What Makes a Website Perfect
As the web grows older, standards applied to the quality of your web presence (especially if you are into business) get enhanced and polished. W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) keeps issuing more standards and tweaking old ones, and following those tweaks to a date is not an easy task in itself.
My definition of a perfect website will probably differ from yours. You might be a fan of Flash and complex 3D graphic effects. I can't say I hate Flash; it's more like indifference. I need it to play Scrabble, so I don't block it, but if I ever see a website that tells me to wait until the Flash movie completely downloads, and it takes a minute via my Internet connection, which is an ADSL, albeit restricted broadband, I'll never visit that site again.
When it comes to graphic design, cool Photoshop effects are just fine, they show the designer's level of expertise, but harmony in composition and colour scheme are more important to me. I've seen designs that are completely 2D, and there's nothing really cool in them, but they look professional and pleasing to the eye because of the perfect sense of harmony demonstrated by the designer.
CSS or Tables?
CSS any day. Yes, I know it's not easy to achieve cross-browser compatibility without using tables to control layouts, but it's possible. Browser vendors are moving in the right direction, however reluctantly, and it's easier today than 5 years ago. Besides, a few really good books have been written on the subject, and thousands of websites offer code samples, developed with love and thoroughly tested, which designers can use for free. Here | is just one of them.
Why not tables? It's important to have semantically correct markup these days. HTML markup is here not just to ensure your site will look as you want it to look; it's important for accessibility purposes. Semantically correct markup means that tables are used for holding tabular data (their original purpose) and nothing else.
Oh, and of course a perfect site should have perfectly valid HTML markup | and CSS |. I'm pleased to see that more and more businesses understand this.
More on accessibility
Making a webpage completely WAI-AAA compliant | is a lot of work and extra code, but it's worth it if you care for your visitors who have disabilities. WAI-A is much easier, and is definitely going to be a must soon - in the legal sense of the word. For some niches, it's already there.
At the start of this year I had to give up my previous job along with the site I had spent years working on. I never finished the marathon of making each page of it WAI-AAA compliant, but it was still an invaluable experience in terms of learning the ropes.
If you are looking at building a WAI-AAA compliant website, my advice is, validate your templates from the very start. Rebuilding an existing large website to meet the highest accessibility standards is way too much work.
SEO
It can help you make your site even more perfect, but it can also make it totally lousy. It depends on your understanding of the word SEO. If it means rankings at all costs for you, you'll meet a lot of temptations on your way to your goal. Be wary. After all, it's people who buy from your site, not search engine spiders.
Which SEO factors will make your site more perfect?
I'd vote for the following list.
- As little HTML markup as possible; JavaScript and CSS moved to separate files.
- All links back to the home page point to the root, not to index.html or whatever other file name it might be.
- The non-www version of every page URL 301-redirects to the corresponding URL with www in it; the home page doesn't redirect to anything in any way, shape or form.
- One URL per a page; no duplicates.
- Clean static URLs. No parameters, or as few as possible. The site's structure is highlighted using subfolders and meaningful file names.
- Clean HTML links everywhere including the sitemap. No JavaScript where CSS can fulfil the same task. No graphics or Flash where plain text will do.
- Intuitive, usable navigation.
- Unique title and meta tags for every page. Remember, the only meta tags you need for SEO are description and keywords. The robots meta tags are used to restrict the spiders' access to information, not to encourage it. And no, you don't need revisit-after.
Which SEO factors will make it lousy?
- All kinds of SEO spam, needless to say.
- Enforced keyword density (by all means do your keyword research and optimise your copy, just don't overdo).
- Long and ugly link pages meant mostly for link exchange.
The search engines are no longer stupid, and cheap tricks no longer work. If you build your site for humans, the engines will sooner or later appreciate your efforts. Want more links? Adding a blog and writing something interesting in it frequently and regularly might help. Using shortcuts like reciprocal links you'll most likely just shoot yourself in the foot.
What else
Content. It should be unique, truthful and last but not least, well written. Professional copywriters, editors and proofreaders are your best friends. A silly typo sitting on your home page might ruin your business image and scare the customers away.
People will forgive you all the typos in your blogs or forum posts, but not those on your business website.
If your site is multilingual, please never, ever, ever use translation software to translate your content. Only a human can do it properly.
Appearance. You don't need that horisontal scroll bar, even if it's just at 800 x 600 resolution, which some people still use. With CSS, you can make your layout liquid so it'll fill the whole screen at 1600 x 1200, but shrink gracefully at 800 x 600, and still look perfect.
Security. It's important to have your site as hacker safe | as possible. It's no fun being defaced.
Last but not least, if the site is dynamic and interactive (a forum, a blog, a networking site, etc...) flawless functionality and fast response are essential.
Having a perfect website is not an easy goal to achieve, but it's well worth it.
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Last modified: 20.10.2009
