Web Log Costa Blanca

An end-of-year apology to my readers. I don’t post as often as I mean to. One reason is that my posts are becoming too measured—and too all-inclusive. So here is a quick tip for all my readers who are designing or developing Web sites.

It follows from my previous advice on alt text.

You shouldn’t only use words that make it easy for your visitors with visual problems to see your image in their mind’s eye. You should also use a word or phrase from your keyword list. Search engines often pay close attention to the alt text that goes with images.

That’s it. Happy New Year!

I’ve discussed text display in earlier posts. Headers are a special case.

Headers matter to search engine spiders. They also matter to human readers, because they break up the Web page and make it easier to scan. You can quickly see if there’s anything on this page that answers your question or meets your need.

On both counts, therefore, the important thing for a page designer is to have plenty of them. As far as sizes go, you can of course use a style sheet to set them to any size you like. I would myself stick to at most three different sizes. When I’m not defining sizes myself, I find that <h2>s, <h3>s and <h4>s often fit the bill.

Very big headers in standard Web fonts like Arial/Helvetica or Verdana are the visual equivalent of shouting. They need to be saved for unusual special effects. People don’t like being shouted at.

At the other end there are situations when it’s useful to have an <h4> at the top of every paragraph (or two). It makes for easier reading. But don’t let the browser use its default padding. Make sure the header is really close to the paragraph below, and that the only obvious gap is after the paragraph before.

Think hard about horizontal positioning, too, and the invisible vertical gridlines that our eyes often find satisfying. In far too many of my early sites, I centred headers. This can give a Web page a ragged, untidy look. I now tend to go for vertical alignment—headers are either left aligned, or indented identically (say 10px or 2% or 5em or …). It makes for a stronger line.

I keep coming across these companies that promise you a top position on Google within 24 hours. Naturally, they don’t spell out how they are going to do this. They are simply feeding off the myth that there is some kind of secret trick which will assure you high rankings.

If there were such a thing, then Google would be risking the very thing that got it where it is. People took to using Google, rather than AltaVista or Excite or whatever, because it found them the sites they were looking for. The whole thrust of Google’s development is to serve searchers rather than site owners.

It relies on a famous algorithm, which, given a search query, puts Web sites in order, from number 1 down. I notice that in the latest version of this algorithm, it is widely supposed to be giving extra weight to domain age. The older a site, the higher a rank it will get.

You’d think this would put the “24-hour” cowboys out of business. But I doubt it. There are always people dreaming of instant success—and other people willing to take their money.

On the 19th of June this year, I posted a short piece about whether or not you should use domain names with hyphens in them. My main aim was to suggest that this was an open issue—to counter “authoritative” statements that hyphenated names were unprofessional.

The other day I noticed an interesting case in point. If you haven’t been to their Web site, which form of their name do you think is used by Coca Cola?

The answer is: the hyphenated one. If you type www.coca-cola.com into your browser’s address bar, you will be taken straight to the site. If you type www.cocacola.com, you will be re-directed to the site with the hyphenated name.

Unprofessional? I don’t think so. It backs up my claim that either form can be professional. It all depends on the name itself and a sensible weighing of the advantages and disadvantages in the particular case.

My last post was about moving sites from one Web hosting provider to another. There’s something I didn’t mention which is very important.

When you copy all the files from the old site, you need to preserve the directory structure, down to the last detail. This includes all the sub-directories of your browser-accessible root directory—usually called public_html, htdocs or wwwroot—and any directories at the same level as this directory, which Web browsers cannot access directly, but your scripts can.

If you are moving to a hosting provider who uses a different system—Linux and Apache, say, instead of Windows and IIS—you may need to change the names of some directories before copying the files to the new site.

All this should be straightforward, if you have a decent FTP client program. There are free FTP clients, and I have used several of them. However, what I use all the time now is a program which I use for all my backups, all my downloads, all my uploads. I have been using it for backups almost since I first came across it, and for FTP work since FTP facilities were added.

The program is called Beyond Compare, and you can download it from the Web site of Scooter Software, who make it. (Its help file used to be called Beyond Help, but they’ve abandoned that particular twee joke.) It’s not free, but it’s not expensive either—and it is quite simply brilliant. It doesn’t just copy and move files. It checks whether files are the same (using criteria which you can control). It comes with file viewers which allow you to see exactly where two files are different—not just text files but binary files, image files, database files, MP3 files…

I should point out that I have no shares in the company which makes it, and I know nothing about them—except that they respond quickly to requests for support. I just think it’s an amazingly useful and versatile program, and I recommend it because I love it.

I have just moved a client’s Web site from another hosting provider to Web Costa Blanca. This is a standard hosting service which we are happy to provide for anyone who wants the job done professionally, or hasn’t the time to do it themselves.

If you have an FTP client, the job is fairly straightforward.

1. Copy all the files from the old site to your local hard disc.
2. Set the site up on the new server. (This job has to be done by the new hosting provider.)
3. Copy all the files from your local hard disc to the new site.
4. Change the nameservers for the site’s domain name from those which served the old hosting provider to those which serve the new hosting provider.

There is, however, one tiny snag. You call the site up in your browser by using the domain name. How will you know if you are seeing the files on the new site—or still seeing those on the old site?

Most people probably keep checking a WHOIS site on the Web—and there are plenty of them. But there is an easier way, which takes a few seconds and has no effect on the site.

While the files are sitting on your local hard disc (before step 3 above) add a brief comment to the main index file—such as <– Web Costa Blanca version –> or <– Hosted on Web Costa Blanca –>. When you call up the site, check the page source. If you don’t see the comment, the site is still on the old servers. If you do, it’s moved!

A few years ago, domain names were considered so valuable in their own right that people paid large sums of money to speculators who had snapped up likely-sounding names on the off-chance.

This doesn’t happen much any more. However, there are still people who buy domain names and then do nothing with them. I have met a couple of them here on the Costa Blanca. They tell me that they have acquired the names—maybe even a few years ago—as though they had money in the bank.

My own view is that they are not giving themselves a fair crack of the whip. Buying (i.e. renting) a domain name and then doing nothing with it is like keeping money in a sock under the mattress. Or worse. The domain name is of absolutely no use until there is a Web site bearing the name.

Even a token Web site—a ‘business card’ Web site, like the one you can set up with Web Costa Blanca’s ‘Nominal Plan’ for £9.99/15 euros a year—is better than waiting until you have the time to create a huge splash.

If you have a domain name that’s doing nothing for you at the moment, get it working for you! “Maybe tomorrow, better today”—as they say in the urbanisation ads.

As a site owner, you want visitors. To get visitors, you need people who are searching for sites like yours to find your site first. That means getting properly indexed on search machines (“ranking high for your keywords”). Which in turn means knowing how to handle search engine spiders.

Readers of this blog may have looked at my long article on search engine optimisation, on the main Web Costa Blanca site. You can also check out any earlier posts, by looking at the ‘Search engine optimisation’ category.

Here are two things you can do to catch spiders—before you write a single word of text or create a single graphic.

1. Name your files for spiders. Apart from your index page—and you can give that a different name by adding a rule to your .htaccess file, if you really want to—give all your pages names which spell out their content, using words that visitors might type into search engine boxes. For example: best-cheap-whatnots.html.

2. Write your titles for spiders. Use the same or similar words in your title tags. These appear in the browser’s title bar, at the very top of the display, and most human visitors ignore them. Spiders think they are crucial.

(Incidentally, some people use the same title tag on every page of their site. This may attract visitors to the site—but they may not get to the pages you think are important. There’s a lot to be said for varying title tags to get different visitors to different pages. This is up to you.)

Have fun!

A Web site needs a domain name, so that human visitors can tell their browser where to go.

Notice, by the way, that the name is just for human visitors. The browser itself uses the 4-number Internet Protocol address, which it has to look up once it’s told the domain name. (If this is gibberish to you, let it be. Or if you’re curious, you can find simple explanations on Web Costa Blanca’s FAQ page.)

The name should make sense to visitors, and stand out for search engines. So a lot of thought can go into choosing it.

There is one issue, however, on which no one is agreed—and many people are dogmatic. If the name is made up of more than one word, should you use a hyphen between them or not? Which is better: webcostablanca.com or web-costa-blanca.com? michaelscannell.com or michael-scannell.com?

Incidentally, this is a dash: —
and this is a hyphen: -
You can’t use dashes in a domain name, only hyphens.

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A couple of posts ago, I suggested that people looking for website hosting or Web design might enable JavaScript error checks on their browsers, to check through Web pages in designers’ portfolios. There is something even simpler you can do.

Every HTML page or XHTML page can be validated. Even ASP and PHP pages can be validated, where they produce (X)HTML for display—like this one. You can check if this page is the real thing by clicking on the link in the side bar which says ‘Valid XHTML’. (Click now, if you like—but do come back!)

On most such pages, designers include little yellow buttons supplied by the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, which is responsible for standards on the Web).

They look like this (for HTML/XHTML):
Like this for valid CSS:

It is always worth clicking on these buttons. A truly professional designer will always display the clickable version, which allows you to check, immediately. You will be taken to the W3C validator, which will tell you if the page is up to scratch or not. If not, it will tell you the exact ways it has fallen short.

It can be a revelation to click on these buttons. Lazy designers often make changes to pages without checking. The buttons are proudly displayed—but give you instant proof of incompetence. The pages aren’t valid, even though they claim to be.

When they aren’t clickable, it’s time to be doubly suspicious. I noticed just today that one of Web Costa Blanca’s competitors has little buttons asserting their adherence to standards. Like the ones here. But you can’t click on them to check. So I submitted the home page to the validator. You may be surprised at the verdict: Failed validation, 36 errors.

I won’t name the company, but you can find them easily enough if you are looking for hosting or Web design on the Costa Blanca. My own feeling is that people who put up a page with this many errors, which displays the W3C buttons, are not just being unprofessional or lazy. There is a simpler word for it.