| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| vegplot |
Websites and validationI've deliberately put this post in the small business chat, rather than the IT section as I think it has more relevance here.A web site, for many small businesses, is the cornerstone of their daily business life and is often vital to the continuing success of their business. It is therefore important their web site reaches as many potential customers as possible. Much effort is put into promotion and advertising but often the small technical details, which help with market penetration, are ignored. By this I'm referring to the quality of the HTML that forms the basis of a web page. Web browsers are often very tolerant of poor HTML code and small errors do not impact on the users browsing experience. However, search engines are far less tolerant. An error in the HTML code could mean some of your pages may not be indexed correctly which could result in a lower search engine ranking than would otherwise be possible. Only good HTML coding practices can overcome this problem, but where do you start? There is a very simple test you can run which shows whether your site meets the standards and it's available here at http://validator.w3.org/. Just simply enter your full web address and see how many, if any, HTML errors it finds. Ideally, you should try and obtain no errors as this means search engine are more likely to index your site and obtain a better search engine ranking which, hopefully, mean more business. |
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| sally_in_wales |
ouch, I knew my site was a bit scrambled after patching it back together after the crash a month or so back, but it really is bad. | ||
| Chez |
I try to do this on all of mine - not always as soon as I put it up; but I aim for it. It's a very good online help tool. | ||
| sally_in_wales |
I mostly need to find a couple of clear days to plod through mine and mend all the links and stuff that wandered off at an angle when the site came back. Someone please graft an extra day onto the week and I might get a chance to do it 
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| jema |
I go through phases, sometime the validators are a bit of a pain but generally they do expose stuff that should be fixed. | ||
| earthyvirgo |
It's amazing how many public sector websites fair miserably in this area too. I tested a couple the other day and the HTML failed on 43 accounts, CSS a few less.
Hence accessibility statements such as "xxxxxx website accessibility is guided by the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and is working with content authors, developers and disabilities organisations to meet the AA standard wherever possible". ... not quite there yet though! EV |
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| Helen_A |
interesting result...
...none of them anything i can do anything about as they are all in the forwarding that the host does.... hmmmm |
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| KrisWW |
Gee, thanks for that. 
I've fixed them all bar ONE... and I can't rearrange it as it's the code for the Mal's cart thing I use. And my html isn't good enough to rewrite it. That is so going to bug me 
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| vegplot |
The problem is that the form tag cannot be nested within an H1 tag. Try replacing h1 with a div e.g. <div align="right"> <form method="post" action="http://ww11.aitsafe.com/cf/review.cfm"><span style="background-color: rgb(204, 255, 204)"><input name="userid" value="D8178318" type="hidden"><input name="return" value="www.ecoknits.com/index.html" type="hidden"></span><input src="buttonbasket.jpg" type="image"></form></div> |
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| Soapnutter |
Thanks Veg, that'll come up on mine too.
At the mo the validator thing is baffling me! But I have all day and it's grotty weather.... What is a doctype thingy? |
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| orangepippin |
If you use Firefox then the HTML validator add-in is very useful. It displays a small icon at the bottom of each page to show whether it validates or not, and then links to the W3 validation engine to show the detailed errors.
Doctypes are set by the website author and are used to indicate which of the various HTML standards a page is supposed to validate against. There are some examples on the http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_validate.asp - W3 schools website. |
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| Fee |
It's great, as are a lot of the other web developer tools on FF. |
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| KrisWW |
Thanks Vegplot! That's brilliant. That one thing was really bugging me. Now to check the rest of the site. OCD - me? Nah... |