Home page slider

Sliders for home pages could be great design elements and can reap the desired results when used well. However, they can also be the reason your traffic decreases. If you have to use one on your site, it’s important to think hard about what your primary message should be. They engage visitors better than multiple messages.

  • Sliders have become the norm and expected element of website design
  • Clients prefer to use them as a visual wow factor
  • More information and images can be displayed above the fold
  • They are easily updatable to include new content
  • Use at most four slides and don’t bombard them with ads
  • Focus on one message throughout the slider
  • Use them specifically for display
  • Don’t use different slides to display different types of content. It won’t make any sense to your visitors

Validation Tools

While contemporary Web browsers do a good job of parsing even the worst HTML “tag problems”, some errors are not always caught. Very often, different software on different platforms will not handle errors in a similar style, making it very difficult to apply style or layout consistently.

Using standard, interoperable markup and style-sheets, on the other hand, offers a much greater chance of having one’s page handled consistently across platforms and user-agents. Indeed, most developers creating rich Web applications know that reliable scripting needs the document to be parsed by User-Agents without any unexpected error, and will make sure that their markup and CSS is validated before creating a rich interactive layer.

When surveyed, a large majority of Web professionals will state that validation errors is the first thing they will check whenever they run into a Web styling or scripting bug.

You don’t have to own several browsers and operating systems just to test if your website is properly running. I actually saw an online advertisement looking for people to hire just to have a website tested for compatibility issues in different OS and browsers.

Browser shot: I’ll admit that BrowserShots takes screenshots really slow; it takes several minutes! But this is one of the few free browser testers that offers a wide variety of OS and browsers, even if no one knows what Kazehakase 0.5 is.

W3C Validation Tools: There is no such thing as getting things perfect the first try; that is why validation tools are available to help you take a glimpse of the little details that aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Where your eyes can’t see, these tools will surely lock their target on.

Website Security

Before you go live with a website, be sure to run it through ASafaWeb.com (pronounced A-Safer-Web). This site, written by Microsoft MVP Troy Hunt, scans ASP.net websites for a range of common security issues, Should you fail any of the tests, it will advise you how to resolve the problem.

Firefox Developers Toolbar

Chrome and Safari have a web inspector built in, but the original Firefox Developers Tool bar still beats them. It’s the perfect thing to detect those little CSS problems when testing your site in multiple screen sizes.

Firebug has the ability to display multiple screen sizes in one browser tab too – which means you will never need to change your browser’s width to test your site again.

Firefox’s Web Developer menu contains tools for inspecting pages, executing arbitrary JavaScript code, and viewing HTTP requests and other messages. Firefox 10 added an all-new Inspector tool and updated Scratchpad.

Firefox’s new web developer features, in combination with awesome web-developer add-ons like Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar, make Firefox an ideal browser for web developers. All tools are available under Web Developer in Firefox’s menu.