Putting All The Pieces Together The Right Way

With all the different browsers out there and the legal requirements for accessibility it's never been more important to ensure you build your website the 'right way'.

Although the way that your website looks is likely to be the key focus when your site is being developed it's also important to understand that they way in which it functions 'under the hood' can make a big difference to how user's will interact with your website, and how often they will return.

And with the wide range of different web browsers in the wild you have to ensure that everyone's different tasks are catered for and no one group of people are experiencing your site any differently to anyone else. Of extra importance is ensuring that your legal obligations are met in regards to accessibility of your site's content as well as providing alternatives for users who elect not to utilise flash or other rich media tools.

Legal Compliance

These days it's not enough to simply slap a website up on the Internet and be done with it like you could back in the early days of web development. Across the world there are a range of legal requirements that websites must meet to ensure that all walks of life can access the information as easily as possible. If you elect to develop your site in Flash then it stands to reason that for non-Flash users you will need to provide an alternative method of accessing your content.

For users that rely on screen or source reading technology you must ensure that the code you utilise to provide the user experience is conducive to being used with these types of technologies. By logically laying out the content within your website you can ensure that the important details are readily accessible by all users (even those who will not 'see' the site as you intended it to be seen).

The last thing any business needs is to be accused of not providing equal access to it's website, the time it could take to correct an existing site could far outweigh the initial investment that would have been needed to get it right in the first place. And although lawsuits are uncommon, more and more businesses are finding that they are being approached by groups in an effort to ensure the web is accessible by all, so you want to ensure you've got it right the first time.

Cross Browser Compatibility

It seems these days that the range of browsers available to anyone electing to surf the web is ever increasing. And with each of these browsers there comes differences that developers need to be aware of test against, as it's no good for your site to look brilliant in one browser only to look rubbish in most others. On the flip side as newer versions of the browsers become available there is more and more parity between the options, but as we all technology changes so it pays to stay on top of things.

By writing code that is standards compliant you are more likely to be compatible across the widest range of browsers while requiring the least amount of browser specific code. Although it is likely in some cases that you may need to write code that is specific to different browsers this can usually be achieved at the end of a build process once the core code is in place and the most common browsers are already supported.

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Loading Times

An important aspect of developing a site for public consumption is just how long it takes for the pages to load in a user's browser, you only have limited time before a user decides to give up and go to another website to get their information or buy a product. The quality of the build is a key component of making your site load quickly and be user friendly across a range of web access speeds, afterall you never know if the user has broadband or is relying on dial-up or a mobile device.

The latest HTML/CSS techniques make it far easier to build lightweight websites, and spending the time to minimise the size of files and imagery can go a long way to getting the right information in front of users as quickly as possible. There's no point having a slick well built website if you load it up with massive images that take forever to download, especially if they are critical to the user experience.

Easy To Maintain

A well built website consisting of good HTML/CSS code will be easier to maintain in the long run, and if you ever want to revise the design in the future you may even find that all is needed is some changes to the CSS and you'll be on your way with a new look and feel. Who wants to have to start from scratch with new pages and templates if the existing ones will do the trick, so ensuring that pages are built correctly from the start can really help down the track.

It also makes it a lot easier to add new styles or content in the future if the original CSS file is well laid out and commented properly. In this instance future developers can easily pick up the code and be clear about what impact their changes may have on existing styles, no need for them to pick their way through every line of code in an effort to make a small change!

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