When you plan for the style and layout of a web site, do you consider what type of audience you are going to build it for? Most people don’t!

It’s not about code, it’s not about style or design, but how it all functions together! For example: a well designed site coded poorly will always fail. What I’m going to discuss is the overall standards to build a well designed, well coded, successful website. Successful meaning it will attract, maintain, and continue to grow.

To build a site that is fully optimized it must adapt to the newest technology available. This means to update everything that goes into keeping the site fresh, because if you don’t, it will become stale and seem worthless.

To put this into context, a professional webmaster, server administrator, or software engineer are the most qualified that can develop a fully functional, new age site with no mistakes. Not everyone can develop a new age site.

Web development is not what you know, it’s what you know NOT to do. In other words, experience and knowledge are only parts of a single function throughout the online system.

A New Age site should be developed using the following standards:

Multi-Browser Support

Browser Screen Shot
(Linux Browsers, Windows Browsers, Mac Browsers, and BSD Browsers)

Validated Mark-up Content

HTML,XHTML, Web Document Validator.

RSS Validator (1) (2)

Java Script

Source Java Script. Prevent Inline Java Script or large source files. Recommend 20-40 Kbs. (85 is considered large)

CSS

CSS Validator (CSS 1,2,3++)

Source CSS. Prevent inline CSS or large CSS files.

Security

Captcha Protection in Forms.

Secure Directories. Protect From Prying Eyes.

Secure Java Script and CSS Files (if needed Java formulas, unique style sheets, dynamic style sheets etc).

Search Engines

• Image Optimization
  • Compression (weight)
  • Alt Tags (SEO)
• Meta
  • Optimized Titles
  • Optimized Descriptions
  • Optimized Keywords
  • Robots
• Spiders/Robots
  • Slurp – Yahoo
  • GoogleBot – Google

Ajax – use caution with placement and use. Search Engines don’t read Ajax content, only its output.

Search Engine Friendly URLs.

Website Design

Aim for Speed.

Flow (Left To Right – Top To Bottom).

Fit Your Overall Audience (Kids, Teens, Adults).

Directory Structure.

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Every web site owner wants their site listed in search engines at the highest ranking position, but they overlook what might be damaging their possibilities. The key is to make sure your HTML and JavaScript code contains all important close tags and optimized short coding – error free!

Your HTML code might possibly contain errors that were mistaken for spamming techniques. Your web site HTML code most certainly needs to be clean and without ANY errors in order to maximize your site’s ranking potential, thus, making your code search engine friendly.

If you have JavaScript running on your web pages for certain scripts, search engines do not read JavaScript. This will eliminate the search engine to read important content. To do this, optimize your JavaScript and create short, but clean JavaScript code by outsourcing files. This will also keep your web page code in uniform for search engines.

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Image ALT tags are the little labels you see when you mouse over an image. This gives search engines keyword-rich information about the image file. Text link tags do the same thing for existing text links. Both forms of tags increase the keyword-rich content of your page and help improve your search engine ranking.

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A robots.txt file enables you to command all or certain search engines’ spiders to steer clear of all or particular pages or files on a given Web site. A robots.txt files is a plain-text file that must be uploaded to your Web site’s root directory. Once uploaded to your site, visiting search engine spiders will read the robots.txt file and implement its directions before accessing the affiliated Web site. All search engine spiders comply with robots.txt standard.

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