Eklog

Here’s a few tips to bear in mind now we have a new range of browsers.

Accessibility needs are becoming more important as a solution to giving cross-browser accessibility to everyone. It’s not just people who have accessibility needs, now it’s devices, or ‘thin clients’ which are having accessibility issues.

There’s some new rules for ensuring your web site works with browser zoom or in the new mobile browsers.

Phone browsers

There’s two new browsers in town: Apple IPhone and Opera Mini (testing on version 3.1.2). They shrink full websites down to a small screen size.

1. Css media=”handheld” is ignored by the iPhone and Opera mini browsers. They think they’re real browsers. Any style-sheet with media=”screen” will be rendered by these phone browsers.

2. Zoom isn’t a raster zoom. The text font size is reduced independently to the spacial elements. It should be reduced by exactly the same amount but it doesn’t always work perfectly.

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One way to optimise your site for Google driven search engines is to create a Google Sitemap.

You can use Google’s script to do this automatically by running it on your (host’s) server using Python or you can create a sitemap manually with an xml page. Including valid xml tag definitions is a sure way to improve the validity of search results.

This is an example of how the xml page is structured:

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/
<lastmod>2005-01-01
<changefreq>monthly
<priority>0.8

Google have a sitemap validation tool available from their support page.

Once you have created a sitemap you need to log in to a google account and find the webmasters area. There you will submit the sitemap address and verify site ownership. Once you do that Google offer the GooglAnalytics information ( Query stats | Crawl stats | Page analysis | Index stats | HTTP errors | Unreachable URLs | URLs restricted by robots.txt | URLs not followed | URLs timed out ).

Search engines are increasingly an important marketing tool for all business - especially those who’s brand is not widely known. Appropriate keywords, content and one-way links from high pagerank sites are the main factors for success.

Other factors include:

• The way a site’s mark=up (HTML) is structured is important. Using the page title and heading tags (H1, H2 etc.
• The way the site is linked together - ie. the navigation system and internal links within the content help if done well
• URLs for variables (e.g. site?p=page1) are disliked by search engines.
• Using frames is a bad idea.
• The amount of time the domain has been in use (by the current owner - google checks this) is a factor.
• The frequency it’s modified.