What do your website visitors do when they come to your website? What do you do when, after clicking on your link from Google, they get to your site and stop?
The importance of having good web coding is as important as having a solid building foundation. A building with poor foundation might look good and stand proud and tall now but when storms or earthquakes hit, will it withstand the beatings?
It is true that some browsers will try to display them even if the code is not valid. What happens is the browser will make an educated guess about what the web developer tried to do. The problem is, different browsers and browser versions or different software on different platforms will not handle errors the same way.
This can result to the following:
So even if your site ranks no.1 on Google search for your keywords today, if your page doesn’t load or makes a mangled mess, then what use that it serve? Nothing but big opportunities LOST!
How will I know if my site is properly coded?
There are a number of tools available online to validate your web codes. Among them are W3C Validation service, MarkUp Validator, Link Checker and CSS Validator. But the best way is to simply look at the code and seeing if it refers to colours, fonts or layout instead of describing what the content is.
As many are learning, Google has announced that one of the factors that will improve your SEO performance and, naturally, your user’s experience, is by speeding up your website. At GlobalSpex, we’ve always been cognizant of this but more for our customer’s and their target market rather than search engines. By using CSS, alt tags, image compression in our web design for speed, style, and 509 disability compliance, it seems this might be helpful for optimization as well. But, as always, we are always learning.
So, we are taking additional steps in improving our website’s speed as well as our customer’s. Google suggests installing their speed tool, Page Speed, to help diagnose and suggest ways to compress the site and speed it up. Below are the areas that Page Speed will review:
So far I’ve compressed our website’s CSS file by removing spaces and extraneous styles. The next suggestion was installing in our .htaccess file with the recommended caching code. (My next post will include this code)
Another web design firm, Questus, polled 435 employed US residents over 18 and asked them what influenced their decision to buy from a website. What they found was their initial reaction to the site made a large impact. 43% agreed that a web site’s appearance will affect their decision-making on whether to trust or distrust the store and 25% strongly agreed with this. 25% of the respondents neither agreed nor disagreed.
“We find that Web sites have three seconds to make an impression,” said Jeff Rosenblum, co-founder and research and strategy director of Questus. “The actual usability is more important than aesthetics, but at the same time aesthetics are critical.”
37% of the respondents noted that navigation can make or break their decision to buy next to 32% who said that checkout process is important. A whopping 68% said price is a factor as well. Another factor was product descriptions and shipping options, 38% and 44% respectively.
So what are we to read from this? Well, design is a very important to a web site’s success. For e-commerce site’s just having your web site on the internet with the best prices is no longer acceptable, a design’s look and feel, navigating to products and service, shipping policies and the checkout process will all determine whether a customer feels comfortable enough to buy from you.
To be an effective web designer and developer, there are some tools to be sure a website looks the same on various browsers. As each browser and browser version renders sites differently, a compatibility tool that provides screen shots is helpful. Below are two tools for Windows and Mac, free for specific usage time, afterward there is a nominal fee.
Another option for Windows XP users is the IE
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
http://www.browsercam.com – Test on all browsers and operating systems including mobile devices but there is a fee.
It’s not imperative that the website look exactly the same on each browser, but it’s important that it renders as similarly as possible and the user experience is not hindered because they choose use a Mac or a different browser.
If you still use IE6, please upgrade!
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