A quick look at the Global Web Stats for March 2008 shows a very interesting change in trends across the Internet. Figures for browsers have always been extremely skewed towards Internet Explorer (IE), which is to be expected as it is the default browser for Microsoft Windows. IE6 remains king (even with its poor standards compliance and plethora of bugs) as users slowly upgrade to the superior IE7. Mozilla Firefox, my favourite browser, has now climbed to hold almost 28% of the market, which is an incredible achievement for a stand-alone browser. Safari, Apple’s own browser is now available on the PC too. Also, Opera is a highly rated, secure and light browser that can be used on any platform. With more choice in browsers than ever before we can only hope that more IE6 users update to the free Internet Explorer 7 or switch over to use Firefox, Opera, Safari or Camino.

The good news just keeps getting better too! With the majority of PCs now shipping with higher resolution flat screen monitors, the days of the majority of site visitors viewing your website on a 15″ CRT monitor at 800×600 resolution are drawing to a close. Even the Beeb has upgraded its website to 1024×768 resolution!

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO as we call it in ‘the biz’) is the term for making a website search engine friendly. It can be an important factor in determining a website’s public visibility and therefore can play an important role in a website’s success. SEO’s can range from a series of simple guidelines when creating a website (like making it fully valid and accessible) to undergoing more complex techniques (like implementing an SEO Analysis tool).

Below are some articles that go into SEO’s in more detail:

A Complete List of SEO Tools
What is an SEO?

Accessible & Valid Design (no longer an oximoron)

Accessibility in web design has been a big issue of late. The era of your nextdoor neighbour’s kid throwing together a website for you on a trial version of Dreamweaver 4 is (thankfully) over. With a plethora of user setups and browsers, time and thought need to be placed into designing websites so that they appear consistently for all. This means that accessible and valid design is fast becoming the norm, not the exception. Proper use of heading and paragraphs, placing alt descriptions on images etc… all act towards improving the accessibility of your website and also help with SEO. A well structured and implemented website will be indexed by search engines better and therefore appear higher on ranking.

Behold… a Sitemap!

So you’ve got a well designed and accessible website with every page titled and just about every other conceivable angle covered. What’s that, your website doesn’t need a sitemap? Well, it does.

Good news though, Sitemaps are incredibly easy to create these days and come in two flavours. First off, an HTML Sitemap is one that users of your site can navigate to and be able to see the layout of your website (our current html sitemap). These can be as simple as a list of all the pages of your website, usually broken down into sections for ease of use. The second type of sitemap is based on XML (our current XML sitemap). This is a file that sits behind your website and acts to improve how search engines see it. A better indexed website is then more likely to appear higher on search engines.

If your website is built on software like Wordpress or Blogger you should have a sitemap generator built in which you simply have to activate. Otherwise you can use the likes of http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate your xml. It doesn’t get any easier than that!

And the best thing is…

If you have no idea about anything above or just don’t have the time for it, we can do it all for you! Our prices vary depending on the level of SEO required (and what shape your current website is in) so to find out more get in touch.