Writing Good Websites
It’s kind of funny, I think, that some websites (still) in 2008 don’t work. Google has recently released guidelines “for webmasters” on how to make sure their sites work across all browsers. (link).
The big surprise?
- Test your site in different browsers.
- Write good, clean code.
- Specify encoding (Unicode, please)
- Consider (!) accessibility
Several years ago these were, except for the third, the method I used to evaluate websites in a study I did. And magically, if you wrote good code (and didn’t depend upon lackluster visual tools to write your code for you, ahem, FrontPage), you were mostly out of the park.
Second, you’ll force yourself to write good code when you take accessibility into account. And suddenly, those graphic-heavy, no “alt” attribute websites, disappear.
Thanks Google. But web pundits have been telling us these tips for years. Is everyone listening?
October 8th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I try, but my co-workers just use DreamWeaver’s WYSIWYG tools and don’t know HTML or CSS. I’m the one reading your blog, and other blogs, and keeping up-to-date on web dev…the people who need to hear the message don’t read any blogs or books or go to any classes to where they could possibly learn.
It’s like having teachers who wrote their lesson plans during their second year of teaching and haven’t changed them since 1975 versus teachers who have been tweaking and improving their classes every year since then. What do you do?