Can your site be found and used by everyone (and everything)? Part 1 of 4

By Stan Grabowski, Website Coordinator for Manufacturing-Works

Intro

It seems like everyone and every company today has a website. From fancy shopping carts, to Flash animations, to simple information-only sites; websites mostly serve to get information or products to visitors. If you have a website, you want visitors to find it, and be able to find their way through the menus to all the information they are seeking. You may also want to be listed high up on search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Now here is something you may not have considered about your site; just because you can use your website, and can easily find your way around, doesn’t mean your visitors can. It also doesn’t mean search engines can index the information on your site.

There are many browsers one can use to view a website, and none are created equal. The most used, Microsoft Internet Explorer, has primarily 2 versions that are being widely used right now: versions 6 and 7. Both behave very differently when reading the code behind a web page. Other browsers; such as Opera, Safari, Camino; Netscape, and Firefox; behave differently still.

So what does this mean when building a website or having one made? I will write three more postings to cover the following points (so please stay tuned!). It means you need to do (or have your developer do) several things:

1. Build with web standards (covered in part 2)
2. Test in several browsers, on several machines (covered in part 3)
3. Make your website “fail gracefully” (covered in part 4)

Building a website with these three basic conventions will help visitors that come to your site see the information in most situations. It will also help search engines find the information you want them to find.

When your site is built correctly, you will be able to reach the widest group of people with your site. There will always be someone who has a problem reading your site due to the vast nature the World Wide Web, but starting with a stable foundation on your site is always the best idea. Please check back for my future posts.