Already Got A Website?
So, you've got a nice looking website. But you get no visitors! What's gone wrong?
A lot depends on the price you paid for your website. If you paid a couple of hundred pounds, or got your 12yr old nephew to produce your website then you probably have a problem. It's easy to put a website on the internet - it's not so easy to do it right.
Take a look at our example to see how your website can look good but still be wrong.
example 2 shows how it could be done.
Finally we have example 3 which shows us how site will progress over the next couple of years.
Here is a summary of the above examples:-
Comparison between 3 sample websites
| Example |
Description |
Pros |
Cons |
| example |
Table based, inline styles |
- Quick and easy to produce
|
- Table based layout
- Bad for SEO
- Bad for the DDA
- Bad for multiple browsers
- Inline styles mean that every page needs to be edited when re-designing
- 28 images needed due to the layout (for example, the golf ball image is split to allow it to break out of the table)
|
| example2 |
CSS styled and optimised |
- Fully optimized.
- Screen readers can read the free-flowing text.
- The menu is at the top of every page, followed by main content - excellent for DDA and SEO
- Styles are moved to an external file - this means we only edit one file to change the entire site.
- Using CSS instead of tables means the site is more likely to work on multiple browsers
- Images streamlined - there are now 18 images
|
- For this page, we still need images for the gradient on the left & right
- To make the gradients full length, we need some javascript - however approximately 98% of browsers can handle this.
- We still need images for the menu items to account for none-standard fonts - this isn't too good for SEO
- Takes time to replicate from the initial example
- Some hacks are needed for Internet Explorer.
|
| example3 |
CSS3 styled and optimised
|
- Less images (5) - we can use CSS3 features to create gradients. Older versions of Internet Explorer still receive the images.
- Removing the images from the menu is far better for SEO and DDA as they are now read as text.
- Older browsers will see a standard font instead of the downloaded ones
- Far quicker to upgrade from example2
- Loading the page is far quicker as there are fewer images
|
- Using none-standard fonts requires extra downloads
- Not all browsers are ready (yet). Internet Explorer 9 will allow these features, but will only be available on Windows 7
|
So, as you can see, each version has pros and cons, but clearly example2 is better for now.. in the next couple of years we will see example3 becoming more useful. In order to get your website perfoming, you need to examine how it is constructed - looking pretty is only the first step to a good website!
