|
Preview DRM-free music
Play clips of the most popular
DRM-Free music in MP3 format
Legal Music .com
Get information on your favorite TV Shows at 
Clarify the meaning of the acronyms on your web site.
Acronym Dictionary
Acronym Finder
Social Networking Web Sites
Register your own domain name at A to Z Domains.
or buy domains at Domain Names For Sale .net
Printer-friendly PDF* format:
Web Site Designers
This Section
|
Choosing a web site design firm
Here are some considerations for choosing a company for designing a web site:
- What level of HTML will be used?
-
The site designer you choose should be using some of the latest
web publishing standards.
For some reason, however, quite a few web developers are
still stuck designing with the 1997 HTML 4.x standard.
In Internet time, this is ancient, so you'll want to watch out for this.
To determine which version of HTML that a designer uses:
- Using your web browser, go to the home page
of a web site they have recently developed.
- Select the option to view the page source.
-
Look at the <html ...> tag.
If the <HTML> tag, or any other
tags are in upper case, or it has no attributes, then
the site was developed with the 1997 HTML 4.x standard.
That might be good enough if the users you are targeting were still
using Internet Explorer version 4, but this is highly unlikely.
If the page was developed for more recent HTML standards,
the <html ...> tag should be in
lower case and have some xmlns attributes.
One of the attributes should be a default namespace declaration
(an xmlns attribute that does not declare a prefix),
which looks like one of these:
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2"
The 4-digit year in the namespace declaration
does not indicate the level of HTML standard,
just the year that the namespace for the initial
release of that version of HTML was assigned.
- How good is their coding?
- To see how error-free the coding is, submit the URL
of the site's home page to one of the online validators:
-
HTML or XHTML only
- If it's an HTML or XHTML site, submit
the designer's home page URL to the
W3C Markup Validation Service.
- XML
- If it's a site that uses XML web pages, such as this one,
(... we need a link to an XML validation service).
- Mobile
- If you want your web site to support cell phones and
other mobile devices, such as smart phones and PDAs, use
MobiReady Report
to analyze the designer's home page or your own site.
For an example of the report, submit
sample.mobi to that form.
- Do they understand how to build interactive web sites?
- Too many web design professionals can build good static web sites,
but don't understand the intricacies of building an interactive
web site using dynamic pages generated by application servers.
Too many times, web sites do not work properly because
the developers did not fully understand how to design
for a client-server environment, as is required for the
interaction between a web browser and an application server.
In particular, close attention must be paid to which pieces
of data are stored on the client side of the connection and
which are stored in the session on the application server.
For example:
- If the prices in a shopping cart are stored on the
client side of the connection, then a knowlegeable
user could potentially alter the prices of items
in the cart before they were submitted to the server,
essentially giving themselves a nice big discount.
- One very popular dating web site stored the ID of the
profile that you most recently viewed on the server,
rather than on the client where their web-based
e-mail form was being displayed in the browser.
So if you had been viewing more than one person's profile,
there was a good chance that the message you were entering
for one person would actually be sent to another person!
How to tell if a developer understands client-server programming
To determine if a web site performs as expected under
normal user interaction would take extensive testing
and depends on the functions of the web site itself.
However, there is a straightforward test, using the
login and logout functions, on most interactive sites,
that can be used to determine if those functions
will work properly under more normal circumstances:
- Ask the developer for an example of an interactive web site
that they have developed and you can try out yourself.
- Register for an account on the site to get a username
and password.
- Log into the site using your username and password.
This should start a session that persists until you
either logout or close your browser.
- Right-click on a link and open another page on the
site in a new window. You now have two windows open
that should be using the same session credentials.
- Go back to the first window and logout, or else wait
however long it takes for your session to be timed out.
- Go to the second window again and navigate to a page where
some personal, user-specific information would be displayed.
The site should display a message indicating that your
session has timed out and that you need to log in again.
If you still see user-specific information at this point,
then the server side of the session did not get reset.
- Close the second window and go back to the first one.
- Right click on a link, the one to "login" if possible,
and open it in a new window. Go to the login page
and log into the site again in the second window.
- Close the second window and go back to the first one.
- Right click to open the second window again.
Navigate to a page where some user-specific information
would appear and make sure you are still logged in.
If it seems that you got logged out, then the client-side session
credentials were not properly stored in the browser session.
back to top
Last updated Saturday December 9, 2006
|
|
