In the early days of the web, site development was looked upon as a dark art and the guild of programming and development alchemysts kept its secrets close to their chests. Now we are all much more web savvy, but when presented with three of four competitive pitches all with differing costs it may be difficult to differentiate between them. All too often the selection falls back on the visual design (I like the blue one), and the client ends up with a site incorporating some inappropriate technologies that present barriers to achieveing future aspirations and a costly redevelopment exercise in a very short time.
Here’s a brief analysis of some of the available technologies and critical factors that may help in the evaluation and understanding of competing proposals.
Web Technologies
There is a bewildering array of technologies and applications available for use in the construction, design, development and management of websites. Each has its own peculiarities, advantages and disadvantages. Clients tend to leave the selection of technologies to their web specialists on the basis that they will choose the those most appropriate to the task in hand. In most cases this is a sound decision – but not always. Some developers have their favourite technologies, in-house IT departments may be wedded to legacy systems, designers have different agendas and priorities to programmers and web marketers.
For a client, it is important at least to have an appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages, to be able to ask the pointed questions of their developers and cut through the jargon. It is all to easy to have a site developed which appears perfect on the surface but may present significant obstacles to what you may wish to achieve in the future.
Below we have reviewed some of the key technologies and applications. But two important factors critical to the choice of technologies are search marketing and accessibility.
Search Marketing
There are three pillars to search marketing: code optimisation, content optimisation and inbound links. Code optimisation means that the search engines’ ‘bots’ can easily search the site or ’spider’ it.
Content optimisation means optimising the text and images to help deliver the most relevant results to the search engines. One key thing to remember is that search engines can only search and analyse text.
Accessibility
Under the 1995 Act, businesses are required to take reasonable steps to make your website accessible to people with disabilities. Notwithstanding the legal requirements, we consider it a moral imperative, and further, there is a sound commercial reason to ensure your site is accessible.
Here are some of the key statistics indicating the numbers of people who might have problems accessing websites :
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There are 8.6 million registered disabled people in the UK – 14% of the population (source: DRC)
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Two million people in the UK have a sight problem – 4% of the population (source: RNIB)
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One in 12 men and one in 200 women have some form of colour blindness – 9% of the UK population (source: Institution of Electrical Engineers)
- There are 12 million people aged 60 or over – 21% of the UK population (source: UK government)
Of course there will be overlap in these populations, but these add up to a total of 48% of the UK population who potentially could face problems with your website’s accessibility.
Web standards
Modern websites should be built to what are called ‘web standards’ as set out by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). These are not just nice guidelines but provide very real benefits. Firstly, search engines like web standards sites – in fact, some search engines will not even look at sites that don’t validate to the standards (though Google is a bit more tolerant).
Secondly, sites that are correctly built to web standards should be naturally accessible. People who build web browsers for people with disabilities (audio browsers, Braille browsers etc.) assume that sites will be built to web standards. If yours’ uses correct standard code their browsers will automatically read your site correctly and translate it into usable content for the viewer,
Thirdly, web standards sites separate the content (words and pictures) from the structure of the site, and the visual design which is controlled by cascading style sheets (CSS). This means you can change any one of those three components more or less independently. So, for example, if you changed your corporate identity you could update the visual look of the site without touching the content or underlying structure. This makes updating your site in the future extremely efficient and saves a good deal of cost.
The Technologies
HTML & XHTML
This is the standard mark-up language used by web developers from the start of the internet. It is still the basic building block. It is simply a language that we can use which a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera etc. plus specialist audio, Braille and text only browsers) can read to tell them how a website should look.
It is also the standard code search engines can follow. It is constantly upgraded and updated by the W3C.
It is still the foundation for most websites and new technologies are usually incorporated inside it.
For
Simple, universal accepted standard. Cross platform from a computer screen to a mobile. Can be as simple or complex as you wish. Search engine friendly, international. Ideal framework for more complex technologies. Many HTML developers about.
Against
In itself, static. Easy to use, but to be used well needs high level of skills.
Recommendations
Use as the underlying code for all websites.
Flash
A familiar technology with growing levels of sophistication. Allows the use of animation, video and sound, and increased levels of interaction.
For
Creates movement and interest, turns static websites into dynamic environments.
Against
In itself it is practically invisible to search engines, similarly it is not accessible to people with visual disabilities. To an unsighted person it is like handing them a DVD. The know it is there, but have no clue what is on it.
Search engines need text to follow and to use to rank the site for relevance. Any text in a Flash movie is encoded and not accessible to search engines.
Recommendations
Use sensitively in conjunction with HTML to enliven websites and create interactive sections and dynamic movement. But do NOT build whole sites in Flash alone as they will be useless for search marketing or to people with visual impairments.
Silverlight
A new and proposed alternative to FLASH being developed by Microsoft.
For
A lot of technical advantages are being claimed but it is early days.
It is a Microsoft product so we can expect it to be widely distributed.
Against
It is a Microsoft product so we can expect the usual commercial restrictions and also hostile response from the company’s detractors which may restrict take up in some hard core sectors.
Requires a plug-in.
Recommendations
At the moment the jury is out – but it is a technology that cannot be ignored.
AJAX
The detail of this is not particularly important for clients, though you may hear your web developers throwing the term around. Simply put, in the past when a page was being updated with data from the server, the whole page would be reloaded into the browser, slowing down the experience. With AJAX only the changed elements are retrieved and from the server and displayed.
For
Often, the pages on a website consist of much content that is common between them. Using traditional methods, that content would have to be reloaded on every request. Using Ajax, a web application can request only the content that needs to be updated, thus drastically reducing bandwidth usage.
Because only sections of pages need to be reloaded, Ajax allows for much more responsive web applications, giving users the feeling that changes are happening instantaneously.
Using Ajax reduces connections to the server, since scripts and style sheets only have to be requested once.
Dynamically created pages do not register themselves with the browser’s history, so clicking the browser’s ‘back’ button would not return the user to an earlier state of the Ajax-enabled page, but would instead return them to the last page visited before it.
It may also make it difficult for a user to bookmark a particular state of the application.
AJAX commonly (though not necessarily) uses JavaScript: because most search engines’ crawlers do not execute JavaScript code, web applications need to provide an alternative means of accessing the content that would normally be retrieved with Ajax, to allow search engines to index it.
Recommendations
A useful technology – for most applications the negative aspects are outweighed by the benefits, but make sure the developers employ workarounds to ensure you site does not suffer in the search wars.
Rich Media
With the growth of broadband penetration, we have seen an explosion in the use of rich media – video, audio, interactive applets etc. Now we can stream web-only commercials onto a site, give demonstrations, play music and audio voice files, and allow real-time interaction.
For
Allows for a richer user experience, more akin to the television experience.
Permits physical demonstrations.
Pushes the boundaries of what can be done on the web.
Against
We need to provide alternative content for search engines to follow and for visitors with disabilities.
Some types of organisation block rich content and often sound is not available in office contexts.
May present problems when being accessed via devices such as PDA’s, mobile phones etc.
Recommendations
Use to enhance sites, build brands and create a wow factor, but always ensure alternative content is provided.
