Although nearly 90% of all personal computers use Internet Explorer from
MicroSoft as
their web browser, several other popular browsers are available. These include;
Netscape
,
Opera
,
Mozilla
and
Konqueror
.
Your website pages will not look identical in all web browsers. Care in
basic page design will
ensure that your pages will still be usable by all your visitors. Explorer is not
the only web browser! The rest are far less forgiving, when they try
to display a poor page design. Meta tags are important to all web browsers.
Metatags were abused in the first few years of the
www. Most
major search engines place little value on the declared keywords and
do
not rank web pages from the list you provide anyway. Some
very important meta tags are content-type, description,
language,
author, and contact.
Java is a computer programming language (like C++). JavaScript is a markup
language commonly used on web pages. Sometimes referred to as dhtml, because it provides
dynamic web page actions, JavaScript is not HTML. JavaScript is embedded
into the actual html web page and the browser performs the actions indicated in
the script. A simple method for
designing user interactive web pages.
Free JavaScript resources can come with a big
repair bill. Editing and customizing a JavaScript to function properly on your
business site, can be a time consuming process. JavaScript requires exact
written code. It does not permit close enough markup! Search engines don't
follow any of the
links written in JavaScript.
Search engine spiders
, text only, audio browsers and others can't
see all the
beautiful pictures on your web page. When the web browser (like Explorer) loads
a web page, it also searches for and retrieves
external image files and
temporarily places them on the page being displayed. They are not part of
the written web page. Alt text (alt= attribute) describes the graphic with real words.
Eliminate the alt text and all that's left, is blank page space! Many
beautiful web pages simply appear to be
blank pages to the search engines.
Missing Doctype declaration forces browsers to fall-back
to the simplest document type available. Making the effort to use the correct
declaration, will allow your web site users to access the web page the way it was
written. An important component in producing a really good webpage. Without the
correct DTD your
web page will not validate, period.
Although a blog can be an interesting addition to a "General Interest"
or "personal"
website, business web sites can quickly lose professional credibility
with their customer. Allowing users to add content to your web site
can also create security problems if extreme caution is not exercised.
Weblogs really don't belong on most small business websites. As
tempting as it might be to tell the world about the daily routine at
your place of business, it is not very appropriate. Small business web sites need
to maintain
professional credibility, if they wish
to attract new customers.
Please note: Google does not permit direct searches from non-exclusive business
web sites and so they are not included on the list. Please search Google directly at www.google.com
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