The Yellow Team

Web Site Check List

"Tools to Validate web sites."

With the naked eye, many web developers have a hard time catching mistakes. W3C Quality Assurance Tools has a website called "The Basics - what you should run on all your web pages" . It is a great source of information and provides useful tools that web designers can utilize to troubleshoot their web sites. The main three Log Validators are an open source for everyone to utilize. These tools improve the quality of web sites, find mistakes that have been made, and show step by step information on why it is a mistake. The main validator is called The MarkUp Validator, the second validator is the Link Checker, and the third is the CSS Validator.

The MarkUp Validator, also known as the HTML Validator, allows several formats to be checked. Such document formats include HTML, XHTML, SVG or MathML. This tool is so useful because it explains what line errors were made, and why they are considered an error. On the other hand, the Line Checker tool helps to find broken links and check anchors in XHTML as well as HTML. Then the third tool, CSS Validator, validates documents using CSS stylesheets.

On the web page called FAQ: Checking the character encoding using the validator, the MarkUp Validator converts the encoding to UTF-8. If it fails, it is due to a particular byte sequence being unable to appear in the input coding which in turn, produces an error message. For the following three reasons, the W3C prefers Web Designers to utilize their tools in comparison to only looking at the web site created within the web browsers. The first, is due to various browsers using standard ways to detect character encoding. The second reason is because some browsers have settings for unlabeled pages; which mean some browsers may automatically alter to the proper encode but others may not. The third reason would be to check the text attributes.

About.com has a page called "Solving Problems in Web Design" . The author Jennifer Kyrnin suggests when trouble shooting a page, it is best to work in a standard compliant browser like Firefox. Using standard compliant browsers, help to standardize how most web pages will view the web sites created. Once the page looks the way you want in the standard compliant browsers, it makes it easier to play with your page in other browsers.

If there is a problem area that cannot be figured out, even after validating your page, Kyrnin suggest focusing in on that area. Start deleting and saving one thing at a time. Make sure to check the view of the page after each save to see when the problem erases. Once the problem is eliminated, the last delete indicates where the problem incurred.

Good Principles to Follow

From the Non-Designer's Web Book, every web designer should consider some key elements to make sure their website is successful. Such elements include topics like: text, navigation, links, graphics, and General Design. The first element, Text, can make or break a web page. If the text conflicts with the background, then people will have a hard time reading the contents on a page. The second element, navigation, needs to be simple and consistent. When the navigation is simple and consistent, the site becomes easy to understand and easy to drive through the different aspects of the site. The third element is graphics. Graphics should not be too large that they become big and dorky. The last element, general design of the home page, should fit into 800 x 600 space, and all of the web pages in the site should look like they belong to the same site.