Let’s have some fun in doing SEO. This will also help the readers understand and discuss SEO and even do some research on it. I have found the official article of a Mauritian company specialising in Web design and SEO and they have an article on the subject (this has actually been copied from another site, but that’s what you get for not building your own original content). I will be posting exerpts of this article and the readers are invited to give their views, correct, improve, research and try to be the best in the discussion.

This is the first one.

1. How can you broaden the explanation?
2. What’s wrong in this advice and why?

Firstly, size. Search engines love content, the more the better. If your competitors have more than you do, you need to address that. If you can’t find enough information about your product try adding free resources which will help broaden your scope and keep your visitors interested.

Here is the second part.

1. Why is this sentence completely irrelevant?
2. What do these elements bring to a web page today?

Another reason for low rankings are pages which contain lots of hyperlinks, bold or italicised text or pages which make use of improper headings and/or comment tags.

Now, this one is just a heap of… never mind.

So people, just fire in. We’ll clear the inconsistencies together.

All of my company’s network is down today. So I took some time to open a folder and re-read some chapters I kept around from diverse books. I happenned to come by a quote I did from Mark Boulton’s Five Simple Steps on the use of web applications that made me ponder on how we, web designers, fit in the big picture.

Design conventions are being born. Maturing online, and now business is starting to see the benefit. Now, if I wasn’t using these products or services, if I wasn’t a consumer of the web, I’d be blind to what was possible. It’s not enough to rest on your laurels. If you’re a web designer, you need to be a web consumer.

I think that this quote best describes the state of mind a real web designer must be in. This is how the web designer brings new ideas to his client or entertains same level discussions with hardcore application users. Consuming the web intelligently, this is the real deal. Consume it, understand it and see how you can set this usage in your work.

Not only does this allow you to keep up with trends but it also helps you know how people consume the web. In other words, you’re your own guinea pig. You will then be able to compare your consumption to that of other web users in order to, for example, work on the building of personas for usability testing.

Today, too many web designers forget that the web must be consumed and not just be a sort of magazine layout for companies. Just one question: how many Mauritian companies have a professional blog or a twitter account? Actually the question should be simpler than that: how many companies have a professional blog or a twitter account? How many web designers out there understand the social practices that are maturing on social apps and are proposing them to their clients.

This post actually echoes my first post on the subject (in French). Here we are, another hedge to cross for Mauritian web designers and companies. Too bad, just at the moment when Mauritian companies like E-services have started going towards web standards (repect for that though there’s still a lot to do). So, what is this hedge, the dropping out of XHTML. Yes Sir! XHTML is dead. Well metaphorically.

When?

The W3C has announced last week that it will be dropping XHTML 2 and allow more resources to the HTML 5 workgroup. This means that the expected date of use of HTML 5 is getting nearer. FYI, it was expected in 2022, now just give it 3-5 more years. So, the first question is: why are they dropping XHTML and what to expect from HTML 5?

Why?

There’s one simple thing to take into consideration. How come we all used IE6 at one time (about 90% of the world population having access to the web at that time did) and went completely mad when more reliable and standards bases browsers came out? The answer is: most browsers at that time followed HTML. Standards were vague and HTML, being very permissive did that pages were rendered quite nicely even if there are errors in the code.

XHTML has never catered for errors (at least for critical ones). You mess up a tag, you mess up a site: simple. This is the reason why browsers such as IE 6 had trouble reading such code because they hadn’t been coded to fully understand that code. Going back to HTML will allow web designers to cater for these past generation browsers more easily. No more MSIE_CSS.css and no more hacks then.

What a change! This, however is not over. The change will also occur in the code. How? Semantics. With the rise of web standards we have started to build websites on a semantic basis. We usually use the “document” ID, the “nav” ID, the “header” ID when styling our pages. These selectors have been so much used that they will be given due respect in HTML 5. We will now have new block elements such as< nav >, < header >, < sidebar >, alleviating a lot of our selector declaration burden.

How?

How to cope with this, how to change, what code to use? These questions must be running through some web designers’ minds. Calm down. If you had the good idea of jumping into the standards wagon, you’re in for some change but nothing drastic. The HTML 5 will not be here that soon but you can cater for it by switching back to HTML 4. You can however continue to code in XHTML if you’ve become a code guru. The future browsers will still implement it but you’ll still have to code-hack older browsers.

I hear some who are complaining about the loss of strictness in code. You can actually carry on building on strict code in HTML 4 Strict. It still holds in place and allows you to implement rock-hard robust code.

Conclusion

Few people had expected this sudden change in our everyday job. I mean, some of us have, at some point or another, spent weeks switching to standards and are now a bit astounded to have to go back to that code we tried to go past. This however goes for what the web and web standards stand for. Access to information to everybody in equality disregarding his/her components be they old school browsers. HTML 5 will be giving this back to the web either we like it or not. Anyway, it is a great challenge lying in front of us and it will also be fun to see the changes and work on them. I’m actually really thrilled about this.