Web Usability & Website Optimization

Web Usability and SEO
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Friday, December 30, 2005

Happy 2006 to Usability n SEO Professionals

2006 Wishes to Usability and SEO Experts
Lets promise ourself to build and develop Highly Usable, Accessible, User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly websites in coming year 2006.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Quick Guide to Web Accessibility

Section 508 states every website should be accessible to disabled people, well if you could make a web site which is accessible to people with disabilities then its obvious that normal user can also access it, then why not develop websites for everyone.

Here's a quick list for making Accessible websites

  • Use 'alt' atribute for every image/visual elements, and client-side image maps for images with multiple links.
  • Use Captioning and Transcripts of audio if you are placing some audio in the webpage and description of video files.
  • Use Accessibility keys to access atleast the main pages on the website.
  • Use 'longdesc' attribute to describe/summerize graphs and charts.
  • Use 'acronym' element for acronyms/abbreviations.
  • Use 'label' elements for form fields.
  • Apply 'title' attribute wherever possible.
  • Use CSS for layout.
Web Usability and Web Accessibility should be the key factors while developing a website.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

First try with Tableless Design

Well, I was wondering how do they design webpages without tables, then I decided to give it a try myself. While there are many advantages of Tableless Design over designs built with tables, but when I tried it myself, I found it little difficult and time consuming but the end product you achieve is same as what you can achieve with tables.

The basic reason why I am so interested in tableless designs is the Search Engine. Optimization of a website can be best achieved if you go for tableless design but then you need to find out if it is at all possible for your own website. Keyword prominence is very important in Search Engine Optimization, this is where tableless design has one of the biggest advantage as you can put the main content before the top design, menu, left navigation etc etc, you can just start the main content of a website just after the BODY tag keeping the same look and feel that you get through tables.

It could prove painful if you try to implement a dynamic website in tableless format. Just to give you an example check this page on Web Usability and SEO designed using tables, the same page has been developed using Tableless Design here.
The best example of tableless design is this blogging website itself (
Blogger.com), just check the source code of this page and find for table.

CSS plays a very important part in tableless design, so if you are good in CSS. it shouldn'd be a problem for you to develop plain HTML websites in tableless format.