www.seowebsitepromotion.com

www.seowebsitepromotion.com -- not so much a review request but a statement on the value of standards and accessibility: XHTML 1.1 and CSS to WCAG Triple-A guidelines.

This is what developing to standards is all about -- plus 48 hours solid work to reskin the original (the dark and light scheme change links on the menu bar)

One of the very few sites I'm actually happy with. Now all I need to do is add some decent content ...

VERY nice! good job

That's kind of you Donna. When I'm Stateside in Louisiana I'll look you up and buy you dinner. You may hold me to that :smile:

Excellent!

I could probably shout to you from here, but thought I'd post instead. It's an excellent site you have there and I approve of your philosophy. Good usability and SEO is the way forward. It's sites like yours that remind me I need to re-develop mine.

One thing I noticed (since this is in site reviews) When I look at classic_business_website.htm with the "light" style sheet your dropdowns drop down from way above the menus. I'd imagine it's a heck of a task validating all the possible combinations of your pages.

Hiya, VORD. I dropped you a mail about 6 weeks back about accessibility -- must have gotten lost in the junk mail.

What browser you running? I run a cookie which captures info then call a shot of JavaScript which reloads with the appropriate menu offsets -- for both the dark and light skins.

Can you try an F5 on that to see if it clears it. I've not tested in Mac. I do know there may be issues with background CSS image loads but it's a DOM level call I'm making so it should be ok.

Thanks for the heads up

Sorted it. I had added additional header background images with new IDs and, of course, forgot to include display: none; for these in the alternate stylesheets. All should now be fixed.

Momentarily confused but now happy bunny :-D

Bloody good thing these forums are around :-D

ahhhh. Really sorry. I switched E-mail programs about 6 weeks ago. I've found your mail on the old e-mail program and will reply imminently. I'll owe you a beer.

Might have to pop in to town of a weekend and have a pint ,,, not being one to turn down an offer of refreshment -- and make a new contact.

Cheers :smile:

Hi enigma,

You have really upset me with this site review request of yours.

I enjoy going through people's sites and finding something that I can point a finger at and saying "you want to try altering so and so as this is affecting it" and so on BUT I CAN'T SEEM TO FAULT FIND YOUR SITE!

Quick loading - Nice colour scheme (easy on the eyes) - javascript source placed in other locations - good use of css and headers - I hate you.

I am in the UK and am trying to get into this field and joined this forum to learn more. I can see by sites like this, I have a lot to learn.

I like it.

-G10-

PS 'A pic of a CBR as well. What more can you ask for'

I really like the dropdowns. Is that javascript?

Yup... nice job... love those drop downs. Clean.

Agalychnis

Hi, G10. Thanks for the positive critique.

I want to show webmasters what can be achieved when developing to standards.

I am not a strong graphical developer or designer, more a stylist, but the adoption of W3C and accessibility standards has meant that the act of web creation has become a more streamlined and fluid affair since I can concentrate more on the aesthetic aspect of delivering knowing that the underlying structural framework will be as sound as my current understanding of what it technically reliable. In other words, I can reverberate within a structured framework which has now become almost a gut feeling for what will work, allowing greater focus on the aesthetic aspects of development without compromising the process though structures which fail halfway through the build due to a poor technical understanding of the implementation.

It was Dave Shea and his CSS Zen Garden who got me thinking about standards last September. I eventually got around to submitting my own conceptual design in February - So Long.... It's not spectacular by any means but it was the focus I needed, the kick in the right direction toward stronger development.

Having tucked a fair bit of CSS under my belt, I looked to the next stage: structured mark-up. All my current sites are now written to XHTML 1.1 specification. I tried www.w3c.org and came away thinking What the hell was that all about

These guys are the standards backbone of the Internet and, as such, they can't be expected to be literary masters. The delivery is dry as a bone and as illuminating as a dead glow worm -- but they know their stuff. And buried away within the site are the dry, brittle leaves of the tree of knowledge. Unfortunately you need to be a bloody Vulcan to understand what they're saying.

And that's because it is purely a reference work and you need to look elsewhere to see how these development standards are implemented in the real world of web site design and return when you need clarification of a point of implementation, syntax or semantics.

But they do offer a handy service: their mark-up validator: http://validator.w3.org. Bung in the URL for your site or upload from your desktop and it'll run through it and deliver a compliance report. Great , my first upgrade to XHTML from HTML 4 fell apart like a disaster movie. At least I was the only one injured ... well ... my pride. (Here's their CSS validator.)

But I persevered and realised that most of the errors were easily corrected with a closing forward slash and those I couldn't fathom were elaborated upon with a link reference (again as dry as a bone but it gives a nudge in the right Google direction). Within a couple of days I have a valid XHTML 1.1 site. The fact that the design was still piss poor didn't matter, that's just the flesh on the skeletal structure which I could attend to later.

So I had a site built with valid mark-up and a CSS file which helped separate presentation from content. And that is the key to web development. Your page mark-up contains all the content and nothing more. All the stuff that says it should look like this and work like that (font size, colour, weight; dropdown menu DOM access JavaScript code) should be held in other support files which are referenced by the mark-up.

And finally ... accessibility ... making a site accessible to as great an audience as possible who use a variety of connection speeds and a whole universe of browsers, and who may be physically or cerebrally challenged. GAWDs - the Guild of Accessible Web Designers - is a great place to enter the world of accessibility.

That's a whole other melting pot. But I'm getting there slowly ;-)

innovationnow! and Agalychris -- thanks for the comments. The menus are JavaScript (supported by a <noscript> block) which accesses the DOM (Document Object Model) supported by all modern browsers.

Just realised your handle is innovationowl, not innovationnow! Sorry :-D These tired old eyes ...

I got cheesed with that. I was a pixel-perfect designer and it was only the 'revelation' of standards that allowed me to get close to identical cross-browser mark-up.

Well, at least the browser wars are over and we're now concentrating on compliance.