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Web and Graphic Design for Cool Cats |
Well work wise things have been quiet over the summer as we’ve bought our first house in Cullompton. We had a month overlap to decorate before we moved in but the house has taken up most of the summer.
As it’s now Mabon, the Autumn Equinox my mind is turning to Yule and Christmas and I have a few ideas for new cards, so watch this space.
It always amazes me how many web developers don’t validate their website code. To me it shows that they are unprofessional and possibly lazy, it’s not a difficult task and if you are writing good web code then it shouldn’t be difficult to validate a site.
So what is validation? There is a non-profit making organisation called W3, the World Wide Web Consortium that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. It’s sponsored and supported by all the big IT organisations Microsoft, IBM, Apple etc. They provide on an online validator http://validator.w3.org/ that will show whether your website has valid code. Valid code means that all of the code works, it’s clean, tidy and functional. It’s useful for developers as it picks up errors and shows what and where they are so that you can fix them. Why don’t you check your website to see how good your web developer really is?
So as well as showing that your web developer really knows how to code, what else is validation useful for?:
1. Cross browser support – this means your website should look the same in all browsers. Have you noticed there are more about these days, Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari?
2. Which leads us to accessibility. Accessibility is big news these days, do you want to discriminate against someone because they have a disability, if your website doesn’t work in specialist browsers for disabled people you could be accused of being discriminatory.
3. If your web site is built to certain standards it means that if your web developer ups and moves to Timbuktu that any other competent web developer should be able to update and maintain your website.
4. Despite what they might tell you, there is little or no certification for Web professionals, and only few universities teach Web technologies. I was quite lucky in my degree that this was covered in extra courses after our exams in the second and third year. Able professionals will take pride in creating Web content using semantic and well-formed markup. Anyone can create a website using Word these days so it really is a way of separating the professionals from the cowboys.
I always try to make sure websites I create validate, although I will add the caveat that with content editable sites I can’t help what my customers add. For example with shops that use Zen Cart. Validators hate ampersands (&) because they are used in many html tags, so if you want to use an ampersand in your text, then you should be typing (&).
Have a play with the validator and see which companies and developers are really professionals http://validator.w3.org/.
After the starting this blog, I obviously had to update my website as this was really replacing the little news column I had. So I thought I would give the whole site a minor overhaul. I had a little trick at the bottom of the page where you could click and change the page background but the other images weren’t that good and didn’t really match the theme so I suddenly struck upon the idea of doing four seasonal images. Then of course, my brain working the way it does, I suddenly thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could write a script to check for the month on the user’s computer and then change the background according to the season? Well a few tears and frustrations later, I managed it. If you don’t believe me you change the date on your computer and reload the page (you may have to close your browser if it has cached). I have mapped Spring to March, April and May; Summer to June, July and August; Autumn (Fall) to September, October and November; and Winter to December, January and February. Of course these only match if you are in the northern hemisphere.
I love little tricks like this and many of my websites have them, just something that makes it a little more fun or interactive. Let me know if you would like something special for your website.
Well, after helping a customer set up a blog the other week, I thought I would use this domain to promote my own business, and replace my news feed on the website. It will give an opportunity to go in to more depth with some of my recent projects and plans for the future. I’ve recently created my first WordPress theme for a customer so will do so again for own my blog, and hopefully give away a couple of free ones as I quite enjoyed the process.
So it’s the beginning of a new financial year, and we’re going to be moving house soon, so a whole new town of customers awaits, so let’s hope this one is going to be happy and prosperous for us all.
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