Website Articles

One of the big problems on the web is that there is no semantic meaning to any of the information on it. What this means is that the code in your website describes how to display the information (bold, underlined, italics, left-aligned, right-aligned, etc) but it doesn't explain what it actually means.

That's fine for humans. When you're reading a website, you can understand what is about because you understand English. But computers, and search engines don't.

As I've explained in several previous articles, when search engines look at your website so that they can index it, they don't see it the way you see it.

For a start, search engines don't understand images. They can't tell what's in the images and they can't tell what the images are about or what they're for. They also can't understand fancy javascript or flash.

I meet lots of people who are disenfranchised with the web. They've had their fingers burned with a cheap website (or even an expensive one) that didn't produce results. They frequently come to the conclusion that the web just doesn't work, at least not for their industry, or they come to the conclusion that it's all just a big con.

This is a shame, and it's caused by the huge numbers of poor quality of web designers in our industry.

Google has announced that it will no longer support Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 in it's online applications. For web designers, this is great news. It has been the bane of our existence since it was released in 2001.

Everybody has an email address these days. And there are countless companies offering email services, usually for free. Does it matter how you receive your email? Does it matter what your email address is?