Can anyone tell me some of the most important usability, accessibility and SEO guidelines, which must be taken into considerations while developing a good Web2.0 website ???
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=content&ID=12#Web
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522
Don't get too hung up on the "Web 2.0" buzzword. Accessibility standards have been around for a long time and are an important part of any web site.
SEO hint: Rewrite your dynamic URLs so that even the actual URL may be dynamic, it appears static. This allows spiders to fully index your site.
On Apache, you can do this by using mod_rewrite and there are symilar techniques for IIS.
Example:
Instead of
http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/getproduct.pl?id=12345
use something like
http://yourdomain.com/products/12345
As an alternative (or additional measure for those dynamic URLs you cannot rewrite), you should create a site map.
Incidentally, there was a recent article on it.
Other good Usability articles:
30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of
12 Useful Techniques for Good UI Design in Web Applications
10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques/
10 Usability Nightmares You should be Aware of
While I dislike the 'horror' tone of the article headlines, the articles themselves are good practice.
Related
As my title explains, how do I adapt a website for blind people? From what I've heard, there's a new Swedish law at the end of this year that says that websites should be adapted for blind people. It doesn't concern all websites, but website that contain information about the authorities such as police, hospitals, banks, pension/retirement benefit and so on.
This is the absolute first time I've heard of this. I have no idea how to adapt the homepage for blind people for the company I work for. Any ideas?
Where do I begin and how do I apply sounds that reads the content of the site? Is there any tutorial on this matter?
This is quite a broad topic but can be covered relatively easily.
What you're talking about is making use of Web Accessibility. The best way to be able to achieve eb accessibility is to make sure that your mark-up is valid and everything keeps to a certain structure that a screen reader or robot would be able to read it with ease and relay that back to a blind person.
The W3C have a full initiative towards Web Accessibility (the WAI) who are there to sort out how to verify a page is accessible for those incapable of accessing the web in the normal way (Mouse, keyboard and monitor).
They have a set of easy checks which are easy to follow and make amendments from your website to.
Read them here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/preliminary
Ultimately, your best way to achieve full web accessibility is to ensure that the HTML mark-up is clean and has every last piece of meta data required, all images have alt tags and the structure to your page is easy for robots to understand and follow. HTML5 helps with this massively as you now have the usage of tags such as <article> and <aside> which are there to determine article areas and article details areas (great for blogs and news stories).
Hope this helps and if you need more information, then the W3C and WAI are your best bets.
W3C: http://www.w3.org/
Wai: http://www.w3.org/WAI/
There are a number of different standards people use when designing for accessibility. You generally need to include things like alt tags for images and links on your page, ensure your page can be viewed without JavaScript, high contrast modes, etc.
Try looking at WAI for some standards and how to get started. If accessibility is being enforced by your countries legislature, they will generally choose a standard or create one that you should adhere to.
Generally people viewing websites that need to hear the content will use a screen reader. It will go through the content and read it to the user. There are a number of readers that you can use for free and try out.
I defied all conventional knowledge, and wrote my HTML5 site first. Now I am writing the HTML4 site and adding a script which detects old browsers. The question I have is mainly regarding web safe fonts. I am aware that it is best practice to use HTML instead of images of pretty text, for the benefit of SEO. However, since the HTML5 website exists with the HTML in the headers, I wonder if it is safe to use images to represent those headers in the HTML4 version of the site. Simply put, will my web client's indexing suffer? I feel that the HTML5 version will ensure good ranking, but I wanted to put it to the community and get an opinion.
Second question, should I create the more accessible version in HTML4 or XHTML?
Finally, is there a simpler way to make a new site backwards compatible, and still be able to make use of newer technology?
After a fair amount of research, I found that it is not so unusual to create a site in HTML5, and implement items for the purpose of graceful degradation.
At this site: spacebug.com/gracefully-detect-old-browsers-and-fallback-from-html5/, the authors recommend not using PHP user agent variables to detect browser capability. It says that there are too many user agents and that headers change, etc. Check out the link for their in-depth explanation. It offers that the right way to do it is to use javascript to check for certain capabilities. Since my purpose is to either render it in HTML5 or render it in XHTML, this makes my life pretty simple.
Once I found that javascript was the way to go, a simple Google search led me to this site: diveintohtml5.info/detect.html. This offers a number of methods for detecting browser functionality as it relates to HTML5.
For those who are not as savvy with the code, or for those who are looking for a quick solution, the second website also offers a link to modernizr.com, which is an "open-source MIT licensed javascript library that detects support for many HTML5 and CSS3 features."
So, thank you all for your input. I have learned a great deal from this experience, and I am hoping it will make everything much more user friendly and efficient.
Happy developing!
Kat
I have just read a lot of different information about Data-Vocabulary.org and Schema.org about how it's good for SEO. But I'm really not sure that anyone uses it in a real site. Am I right?
If not can someone provide some links to real site with this stuff?
And second question does it make sense to use it in HTML5?
Search on Google for any restaurant, or destination covered by TripAdvisor or Yelp (in other words, any restaurant or destination) and you'll see the magic of microformats at work -- see the rating stars and other meta-information?
And yes: use them. And yes, follow schema.org guidelines. And no, it doesn't matter at all which version of HTML you use them in, so write in HTML 5 and do other good things.
Whether they help for SEO is a somewhat different question. Microformats are unlikely to have a significant influence on your site's rankings as long as you use them as suggested.
However, take a look at the pages that have them and are able to influence what a search engine displays when it lists your site. While some have argued that "there's no need to click through if all the information is summarized" this has not proven to be true in practice. (See this article http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-rich-snippets-structured-markup-for-high-powered-seo-99081). In short, having microformats that distinguish your site from others is good for everyone.
The Semantic Web is an awesome idea. And there are a lot of really cool things that have been done using the semantic web concept. But after all this time I am beginning to wonder if it is all just a pipe dream in the end. If we will ever truly succeed in making a fully semantic web, and if we are not going to be able to utilize semantic web to provide our users a deeper experience on the web is it worth spending the time and extra effort to ensure FULLY semantic web pages are created by myself or my team?
I know that semantic pages usually just turn out better (more from attention to detail than anything I would think), so I am not questioning attempting semantic page design, what I am currently mulling over, is dropping the review and revision process of making a partially semantic page, fully semantic in hopes of some return in the future.
On a practical level, some aspects of the semantic web are taking off:
1) Semantic markup helps search engines identify key content and improves keyword results.
2) Online identity is a growing concern, and semantic markup in links like rel='me' help to disambiguate these things. Autodiscovery of social connections is definitely upcoming. (Twitter uses XFN markup for all of your information and your friends, for example)
3) Google (and possibly others) are starting to pay attention to microformats like hCard and hCalendar to gather greater information about people and events going on. This feature is still on the "very new" list, but these microformats are useful examples of the semantic web.
It may take some time for it all to get there, but there are definite possible benefits. I wouldn't put a huge amount of effort into it these days, but its definitely worth keeping in mind when you're developing a site.
Yahoo and Google have both announced support for RDFa annotations in your HTML content. Check out Yahoo SearchMonkey and Google Rich Snippets. If you care about SEO and driving traffic to your site, these are good ways to get better search engine coverage today.
Additionally, the Common Tag vocabulary is an RDFa vocabulary for annotating and organizing your content using semantic tags. Yahoo and Google will make use of these annotations, and existing publishing platforms such as Drupal 7 are investigating adopting the Common Tag format.
I would say no.
The reason I would say this is that the current return for creating a fully semantic web page right now is practically zero. You will have to spend extra time and effort, and there is very little to show for it now.
Effort is not like investing, however, so doing it now has no practical advantage. If the semantic web does start to show potential, then you can always revisit it and tap into that potential later.
It should be friendly to search engines, but going further is not going to provide good ROI.
Furthermore, what are you selling? A lot of the purpose behind being semantic beyond being indexable is easier 3rd party integration and data mining (creating those ontologies). Are these desirable traits for your data sets? If you are selling advertisement, making it easier for others to pull in your content is probably not going to be helpful.
It's all about where you want to spend your time.
You shouldn't do anything without a requirement. Otherwise, how do you know if you've succeeded? Do you have a requirement for being semantic? How much? How do you measure success? How do you measure return on investment?
Don't do anything just because of fads, unless keeping up with fads is a requirement.
Let me ask you a question - would you live in a house or buy a car that wasn't built according to a spec?
"So is this 4x4 lumber, upheld with a steel T-Beam?"
"Nope...we managed to rig the foundation on on PVC Piping...pretty cool, huh."
Just like it reads.
The simplest and shortest explanation that I have found is: "The Semantic Web is to Machines what the World Wide Web is to Humans".
And as to why you would want that: for the same reasons why you let your Machine compute Pi to the quadrillionth digit instead of doing that yourself. So you can focus on interesting problems and leave the menial work to the Machine.
Well, it might not be fitting in with the "official" definition, but I always try and explain it to people as "It's like syndicating knowledge instead of content."
Why would you want to use it? Well... if you are making applications that could benefit from machine parseable and queryable "knowledge," then... you might want to use it :).
IMHO it's rather ill-defined and not implemented in a broadly useful way at present. It's a good idea and I have no doubt things will tend towards this sort of approach in the future, but it's not there yet.
From wikipedia:
The Semantic Web is an evolving
extension of the World Wide Web in
which the semantics of information and
services on the web is defined, making
it possible for the web to understand
and satisfy the requests of people and
machines to use the web content. It
derives from World Wide Web Consortium
director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision
of the Web as a universal medium for
data, information, and knowledge
exchange.