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.

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