HTML.co.uk

Nothing can be worse than your viewers not being able to view your website properly. Have you ever thought about what will happen if your viewers never ever get a chance to view your website? If you want your site to be listed properly on search engines you, should always ensure that it has proper HTML code to support it. Any site that has HTML errors cannot be properly catalogued or indexed by many of the search engines. This can ultimately lead to a major reduction in the amount of traffic that would be received your website.

Search engines are considered to be the lowest form of the browsers, as a matter of fact they are considered to be equivalent to around version 2 of the browsers. The browsers are not even capable of reading the dynamic pages, JavaScript, DHTML and Flash. They even have a problem handling the frames. In case you are having broken HTML, the web browsers would have a major problem handling, indexing, crawling and extracting the content from your website.

The search engines try scoring the page of a website by looking for all the necessary and relevant key terms in your HTML components within your document. These key components can be anything description, title, alt image tags and visible text. If due to any kind of mistake or typo error, they are not able to find the key components, the spiders might simply leave without even checking the actual content of the web page. Poor documentation is also another reason which can cost you a good ranking on the search engine. For example, when the meta tag is placed in the Body of the web page instead of the Head section, the spider would simply ignore the tag and as a result, you would ultimately lose the ranking on the web page.

There is every possibility that due to deadlines and pressure, you can write TILTE instead of TITLE tag. As we all know the TITLE tags are very important and with this one simple error made by you can actually result in the search engine not considering the content of the web page at all. If the page is created properly by you and contains all the necessary and targeted keywords, there is every possibility that it will surely get picked up and read by the search engine. However any small error like an open tag or for that matter a missing closing bracket of the paragraph can actually cause your website or the web page ranking in the search engine.

Internet explorer is considered to be quite forgiving in terms of any kind of mistakes in the code. If you are building your website only for the Internet Explorer then undoubtedly you are building for the most forgiving browser on the net. Even thinking that your website will be treated by the search engine in the similar fashion as that of IE6 would certainly be nothing more than daydreaming. If your website is not displaying properly in the Firefox, Netscape, older versions of IE and Opera, there are all the chances that it will be read by the search engines as well. The next time you have a problem of your website not getting displayed properly in the Netscape, Opera, Firefox, simply consider rechecking your code.

You will surely be thanked by your marketing department.

If I was to state one thing that makes me uncomfortable and I dislike most while browsing any website, my answer would be its load time. It is the most common and the biggest problem that websites take a long time to load and is surely disliked by all the users. It a well known fact that every individual has a very short attention span because of which a person can keep his attention focused for not more than 8 to 10 sec while waiting for a web page to be loaded. Although, the most ideal response time for any website would be 1 second, but this is really not practical considering the bandwidths available. This is where the HTML optimisation plays an important role.

HTML optimisation is a method or technique of minimizing the HTML file size without compromising on the appearance and the functionality of the web page while maximizing the speed of the page display and thereby offering maximum reader satisfaction. Therefore, it is very important for any web designer to consider three main aspects while designing any web page which primarily include optimising the web pages, brutalizing the graphics in your web page and structuring your site for speed. As the complexity and the need of web design is increasing by day, web designers are ignoring the importance of the load time.

There are a lot of extra characters such as spaces, comments, redundant attributes and returns that are very commonly being used in the web page. Carefully removing or deleting these characters will definitely not affect the appearance of the web page but will definitely help in reducing the size of the web page. Web page is all about balance between bandwidth and beauty. A skilled web designer is able to draw that thin line between functionality and appearance and can wisely design pages that not only appear good but at the same time display also quickly.

Try to eliminate all the leech graphics, leech here means that a graphic that is too big and heavy to sustain its load on its own. Icons should not be confused with graphics. An icon need not be realistic; it just needs to be recognizable in order to be effective. Therefore, avoid the use of very large icons in your website. It is always better to have text based navigation rather than ubiquitous image maps which would chew up a lot of bandwidth. A great way to unify a website visually would be to use a well optimized and well placed logo graphic instead of the un-optimised banner graphic which can only kill the web page’s load time. GIF images of words are nothing more than just being wasteful. Simple plain text transmits faster than anything on the net.

It would not take much of the time to do optimisation of your HTML but it has remarkable effects on the load time and definitely the user satisfaction. It is practically quite easy and achievable to reduce the load time to half without really compromising on the appearance or the looks of the web page.