1. Keep it simple. The simpler it is for visitors to complete a purchase the more purchases (and fewer shopping cart abandonments) you’ll see. Make it simple to find the product and go through the checkout process.
2. Provide complete contact information including a telephone number. Buyers want to know you’re real and they want to know how to reach you in case of a problem.
3. Provide encouragement throughout the checkout process. The best way to do this is to let buyers know what stage of checkout they’ve reached, and to provide them with highlighted signage to let them know what to do next.
4. Use product pictures in shopping carts. This reminds visitors what’s in their carts. It also reinforces, in the visitor’s mind, the reason(s) for the purchase.
5. Link back to the product page. After an item has been placed in the shopping cart, the visitor should be able to click on the item and be directed back to the product page in a new window for example. This makes buying comparisons easier and ensures the visitor has the right item for his/her needs without leaving the shopping cart.
6. Don’t keep shipping costs a secret. Nothing kills a conversion faster than a $19.95 shipping and handling charge on a $10 item. Provide shipping cost information on the first page of the checkout.
7. Is it backordered? The visitor finally reaches the end of the checkout only to discover that the item isn’t in stock. Do you think they’ll come back when the item comes in? They won’t.
8. Provide complete product information including sizes, colors, styles and other product descriptors. This will cut down on product returns because buyers will know what they’re actually purchasing. Avoid hyping products for the same reason.
9. Keep terms of service (TOS) simple and unambiguous. What’s your guarantee? What’s your return policy? Eliminate the boilerplate and give them the facts.
10. Provide a menu of payment gateways. Not all buyers want to pay by credit card. Some don’t even have a credit card. Buyers should be given the option to pay by debit card, personal check (snail mail), PayPal and other similar services, bank transfer and, if the want to stop by to pick it up, you’ll even take cash.
11. Never blame the buyer. When a potential buyer clicks on the wrong link, or forgets to enter all data fields, put up a message explaining the problem and how to fix it. The customer is always right and it’s always your fault. Period.
12. Offer gift cards. Some buyers just don’t know what to buy as a gift. A gift card solves the problem.
13. Use real testimonials. If you’re doing it right, you’ve gotten good feedback from some buyers. Ask permission to use their testimonials. Don’t use fake testimonials signed by Diane E., California. It’s an obvious fake testimonial.
14. Provide a customer service line. Outsource it if it isn’t part of the budget but buyers want to know there’s help in setting it up, whatever “it” is.
15. Avoid distracting links. If your home page is crammed with PPC ads and links to other sites, it’s distracting and you’ll see a lot more bounces (visitors who never get past the home page).
16. Offer incentives. Free shipping encourages buyers. So do upgrades, i.e. “Spend at least $50 and receive 10% off your entire purchase.” Some buyers will do the math and figure out they’re getting something for half price.
17. Welcome repeat visitors by name. Your customer data base is filled with solid gold information including names, purchase amounts, items purchased and so on. First, welcome a return buyer by name. Then, offer suggestions for purchase based on individual buying histories. (See Amazon.com for examples of using data base information to boost conversion ratios.)
18. Provide a currency converter. Not all buyers will be using your country’s currency. Make it easy to convert from euros to drachmas to dollars.
19. Offer a free newsletter. Your regular buyers will appreciate it when they’re notified ahead of time of upcoming specials, new product launches and other site related information.
20. Add a forum. This is a great way for buyers to share information, make recommendations and complain. It’s also a great way for you to handle complaints quickly, with the resolution posted right there on the complaint thread.
21. Provide informational content on your site. This establishes your credentials and credibility as an authority, whether you’re selling kayaks or bake ware.
22. Learn from your competitors. Visit the sites of more-established competitors to see what they’re doing to convert. How is the homepage designed? Navigation? Checkout? You can’t copyright an idea so you might as well “borrow” from the best.
23. Improve site stickiness. In other words, give buyers a reason to return. Some suggestions? The Sale of the Day, Tip of the Day, Your Horoscope, This Day in History, etc. This keeps your site green and visitors returning.
24. Let buyers post product reviews. Nothing sells better than a positive review from another buyer. Of course, the converse is true, too. Nothing will kill a sale faster than a bad review. And if a product receives lots of bad reviews, drop it from your product line.
25. Target your site’s skin to your demographic. If you’re selling collectible knives, your site should have a certain “look” and that look doesn’t include pastels and prissy type. Big, bold and manly — that’s the way to go. On the other hand, if you’re selling needlepoint patterns, a nice pastel background with little flowers works perfectly.

Search engine optimization is designed to attract search engine spiders. It’s also intended to ensure that your site is accurately and completely optimized. But, once traffic arrives on site, conversion optimization takes over.

Keep it simple. Keep it easy. Keep it honest. Not only will you see a boost in conversion ratio, you’ll also see a nice pop in return buyers. And they’re the best buyers any web site owner could ask for.

Think Outside the Design
The value of web standards really amounts to recommended use of markup to semantically describe content. Once mastered, the web developer is able to make intelligent and conscious decisions on the “right” compromises to be made for a given project. We are constantly working towards standardization and have had dialogs about the best practices for markup in various situations, it’s the World Wide Web Consortium’s role to define the purpose of markup; the platform for web site optimization. Web site optimization has little to do with search engine optimization or any of the W3C’s validation tools. Instead web site optimization deals with steps taken to improve user experience by:

• reducing page weight
• re-factoring of markup, CSS and/or Client Side Scripting
• making content accessible
• making content semantic
• reusing imagery
• optimizing the weight of imagery
• caching and deferred loading
• reducing latency to reduce download or render time

In short, the goal is to use the minimum code to achieve the desired result. Unfortunately, clients may not always afford us the proper time or resources required to give the most polished result possible.

Think it Through
Web standards in and of itself does not necessarily contribute to reduced file sizes, however what it does do is endorse healthy use of semantic markup that does give way to reduced page weight through table-less markup and a focus on cascading styles sheets for presentational material. By using document object model scripting, procedural code no longer needs to live inline in the html document itself. Take advantage of your page’s semantic structure to use the DOM to the fullest.

Code becomes art when we take our code to the next level by re-factoring it to maximize it accessibility, by reducing our dependency on the markup for presentation and procedural user interface components. What remains to be done when all of the content in a document is rendered as the design calls for, content properly described with your tags, images optimized for reuse and weight? Now, we consider scale, what happens when this site we’ve worked so hard to optimize becomes highly trafficked (think: Digg Effect) — or if the site already is, let’s make sure to optimize the server’s role in the user experience.

Caching is one of the chief techniques to be leveraged to improve user experience both on the client-side and the server-side. Making objects like cascading style sheets and JavaScript files external can also benefit from the technique of combining files to reduce latency. It’s much less “work” to download a larger file once than it is to download (or check for freshness of) several files. Unfortunately, many of the most visited sites could benefit greatly from even a dash of web site optimization. Issues like multiple CSS file or JavaScript files demonstrate little regard for the benefit they could provide their visitors as well as their own bottom line.

Move on to compression; consider pre-compressing your CSS and combined JavaScript files to reduce server load for high traffic sites. Go a step further and create a proxy that makes sure to return the “not modified” codes to user-agents checking for freshness of objects in your site after first download.

Without getting into code for each portion, let’s consider the typical components of a “well-designed” HTML document:

1. masthead
2. navigation
3. breadcrumbs
4. body
5. sidebar
6. footer

Within each there are a myriad of possible methods to semantically describe the content of the components. Let’s have a look at a few basic cases:

• Unordered Lists for navigation, breadcrumbs and copy in list items.
• Non-tabular layout for forms and use of labels and access keys for accessibility
• Use of <p>, <em>, <strong>, <dl>, <h*>, <table> tags for content

Diving into a single common challenge can show how understanding of web standards cascades into an optimized user experience, let’s look at a technique that combines several techniques by several authors, each of which contributing to many fundamental factors of web site optimization; specifically: image reuse, semantics, presentational separation, caching, latency reduction, image optimization, and accessibility/platform independence. Anyway, on to the challenge — image based main navigation with hover effects. Without being distracted with pseudo-code let’s have a look at how using what we know about web standards leads naturally to web site optimization and a very desirable result for the user:

1. Start with an unordered list, in the case of drop down menus, let’s make that a nested unordered list
2. The unordered list is styled as required using CSS such that any copy is moved out of view by hiding overflow and indenting the copy out of view of user agents that support CSS, but still leaving it accessible to screen readers etc
3. Now imagery is added for each of the tabs for the various states (hover, visited, active etc) as necessary

Normally this is where things would end. At this point we have the desired result, but it’s not an optimal experience for the user. Again to the credit of numerous designers and developers turned authors out there additional techniques can be applied to optimize the menu quite a bit:

1. Combine all of the images for each button in the navigation into a single file
2. Combine all of the image states the navigation into a single file and use CSS to shift the desired portion of the image into view when required
3. Put any JavaScript required for desired effects; e.g. transparency, sliding effects support for browsers that don’t support standards as we would like etc an external file

In the previous three steps, we’ve:

1. Reduced the latency required to load the main navigation imagery and the overall render time for a given page
2. “Pre-Loaded” and cached the other anchor states for the navigation without using any client side scripting
3. Cached the JavaScript for the navigation by making it external (the same is obviously true for the CSS), improving the render time for subsequent page views

Now apply a few more techniques to the site as a whole:

1. Take advantage of the compression support of popular browsers and compress JavaScript and CSS so that it can be sent instead of the larger uncompressed versions
2. Combine our CSS files and JavaScript files respectively, similar to the combining technique for the navigation imagery to reduce latency
   Cache these compressed versions of the combined files on the server so that
3. Cache these compressed versions of the combined files on the server so that every page view requested doesn’t require the web server to have to prepare the same files over-and-over on-the-fly. Instead the server can send static files immediately (which it can do with tremendous ease).

With the various techniques we all apply to our projects just adding a few more steps of optimization greatly improves the user experience.

Make it Your Own
Standards simply help us agree on what markup is intended to do and how it’s elements work together for describing content, web site optimization picks up where web standards leaves off. The W3C encourages us to use markup to describe the content and separate the presentation and functionality from markup as much as possible. Once we get used to the idea our time is best spent optimizing our code to work in the real world. I’ve intentionally left out the “how” because that’s an ongoing debate whose conclusions are at best situational. There are quite a few frameworks out there that help developers apply many of these principles to their projects right out-of-the-box, but it’s not too difficult to build your own framework for your own style of work.

So what’s the final word? Well, similar to the stance that Ethan Marcotte put forward I suggest that web standards be the baseline that we use to optimize sites to perform for the targeted user agents. One day it may be easier to leverage standards to achieve a predictable user-experience across all user-agents, but for now it’s best to have more skills and mastery than are required to render a job well done.

There’s a lot more to site design that choosing some attractive colors and a cool font. In fact, one of the most important considerations is often overlooked by first-time site owners. Content architecture. Where does content appear? Why on that page? How much is enough? What is the objective of the content?

If you haven’t thought about these questions (and many more) you may get lucky, but it’s not very likely. If you don’t consider content architecture in the design of your site, your site won’t perform at optimized levels. It’s as simple as that.

IMPACT: The Importance of Content Architecture
The value of a solid content architecture is, quite simply, the impact it has on visitors. Visual impact. Emotional Impact. Motivational impact. It’s all got to be there. Hi-impact elements?

Attention grabbing headlines.

Short, blocks of simple text. Short sentences.

Hi-impact verbs: Discover, Learn, Save, Earn, Uncover & so on.

Lots of sub-headings that lead the eye from top-to-bottom, left-to-right on each page.

Useful graphics that support the brand or products (not stale, seen-it-before clip art).

Clear, hi-resolution product pix (not something you shoot on the kitchen table).

A logical, easily discernable flow of content & sales copy, interwoven to clearly point out the product or service benefits, i.e. define (or create) visitor’s needs then meet those needs.

Use bulleted lists to present lots of facts in an accessible format.

And finally, throw the punctuation & grammar handbook out the window. Avoid punctuation. Periods and a stack of exclamation points provide stopping points for readers and you don’t want them to stop reading.

Why Is This Important To Me?
You’re launching (or redoing) your site for some reason — to sell products, to market services, to spread the organization’s mission statement or, perhaps a combination of reasons. Regardless, the reason(s) you’re considering a web site or revision is your objective for the site.

Can you state your site’s objective succinctly? In a single sentence? You should be able to sum it all up in just a few words. Then, with your site objectives firmly set, you can go about the business of developing and placing content, i.e. designing the site’s content architecture.

Without a crystal clear site objective, you won’t know what text to put where. Take the time to define your expectations and objectives before moving ahead with any matters of site design.

Why Is This Important to Visitors?
Visitors come to your site for one reason — content. If you’re selling running shoes, visitors expect content related to your products. This, of course, starts with clear, detailed product descriptions and pictures of each pair of Nikes. No pictures, no sales. People like to see what they’re buying (a big part of content architecture).

But visitors today want more than clear, clean product descriptions. They want informational content — useful information on running as a sport, as a discipline, as part of a healthy lifestyle. Not sales hype, just good, accurate, useful information.

Enhancing the Visitor’s Experience
That’s what we’re really talking about when the subject of content architecture comes up. How can you make the visitor’s on-site experience better, easier, faster or more fun? For example, from the home page, how many clicks does it take to find a specific product with a detailed product description? If a visitor has to click through one drilldown screen after another, at least some of them are going to give up.

Placement of content, so that it’s easily accessible, is one way to enhance the visitor’s experience on your site. That means lots of tabs, links and breadcrumb trails to keep visitors on point.

Many sites separate promotional content from informational text. They employ an ‘Archives’ link or a ‘Resources’ tab. This helps in more clearly delineating the purpose of the text in the minds of visitors and to SE spiders that visit your site regularly.

Why Is Content Architecture Important to SEs?
Despite the complexity of today’s SE algorithms, SE bots aren’t bright. They can’t make subjective judgments or decisions about content, they can’t define relationships between different bodies of text and they can’t always find new content, especially when it’s buried deep inside the site.

But there’s lots you can do to better equip SE spiders to accurately assess and index your site with a well-designed content architecture.

It all starts with the site’s design and the knowledge and competencies of the designer. For example, spiders read headlines so make sure your home page has clear headings and sub-heads. Use more than one column on your home page to present two or three headlines to site visitors in an easily-readable layout.

Highlight This Week’s Specials
Right there on the home page, above the fold. In big, bold type. That way, visitors can’t miss them.

However, make sure your weekly specials text doesn’t appear inside a jpg or some other non-text format. Text in a graphics image is invisible to spiders. Make sure key text is accessible to SE spiders by keeping it in a ‘readable’ format.

Identify and Refine
Using various visitor tracking tools you’ll be able to quickly identify problems in content architecture — anything from a dead end with no way out to an underperforming landing page.

Develop a sound content architecture, but be prepared to make adjustments and refinements based on real-world site metrics. Consider content architecture a work in progress. Try a new placement, monitor visitor reactions and adjust accordingly.

Balancing Bots and Eyeballs
SE bots don’t buy things. People do. So, first and foremost, your commercial site must have human eyeball appeal. It must capture the visitor’s attention and hold his or her interest long enough to make a few exploratory clicks to learn more about your site and products.

But if you ignore the SE bots, you may be only partially indexed, under-indexed or even mis-indexed based on search engine taxonomy, and that can be difficult to overcome. Content architecture must be designed for human needs and emotions and for the limited capabilities of SE spiders.

Only then can you fully optimize the attraction of your site to both bots and eyeballs.

Accessibility is a simple concept, but one that becomes difficult to implement within the realities of e-commerce. If you’re wondering why your visitor-to-buyer conversion rate is sub-par, and why visitors don’t stick around longer, accessibility may be the problem. It may also be the solution.

Accessibility is simply making your site user friendly from the top down, beginning to end, and it entails everything from HTML descriptors to the labels on navigation buttons.

Let’s Start With HTML Description Tags
Your site’s HTML description appears below the site’s link on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s your opportunity to provide a prospective consumer of your goods or services with a description of what you offer. Problem is, a lot of description tags are inadequate, or worse, misleading.

A description tag that’s simply loaded with key words doesn’t help your visitors, though it may improve your PR (that’s debatable, too). Here’s an example:

XYZ Bow and Arrow (link text listed on a SERP) bows, arrows, bow hunting, bow hunting supplies, hunting, hunting supplies, bow and arrow supplies, bow and arrow targets, long bows, competition bows, crossbows, crossbow darts….. (the text from the site’s description tag — guess what they sell).

The reader will get the idea, but the text isn’t exactly compelling. Would you want to visit this site? Or, would this be the first site you’d select:

ABC Bow and Arrow
Owned and run by bow hunters, offering a complete line of products and services, on-line lessons, informative articles, product reviews, weekly specials and toll-free, personalized service…

Most of us would opt for the ABC shop over the XYZ operation for one reason — engaging, accurate, detailed, readable, accessible text. The description is just that — a short description of products, services and site content — and it sells the site.

The key to writing description text that works is to write for human eyeballs, not for the digital feelers of a passing SE crawler. New site owners (and some oldies, too) still operate under the out-dated axiom that search engines will make or break your site, so everything must appeal to whatever search engine algorithm is being used to rank sites.

This is Stone Age thinking (relatively speaking, of course) given the highly sophisticated site weighting systems in use today by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Inktomi. Key word dense site text, and key word dense HTML descriptors, aren’t going to improve your PR as they did in days past. Today’s SEs rely more on quality of text and quality of descriptions to assign sites their PRs. Garbage gets you nowhere anymore.

Split Up Your Text
Big blocks of text are difficult to get through on the computer screen, especially for visitors with less than 20/20 vision (that’s most of us). Plus, visitors are an impatient lot. They don’t want to plow through pages of text to find the kernel of information they’re looking for.

Break up your text into smaller, bite-sized pieces and use many sub-heads to direct people to specific information or site features. Good accessibility = lots of <h2> — that’s sub-heads in HTMLspeak.

Provide a Site Map
A site map enables visitors to find what they’re looking for fast — a real convenience if you carry lots of products or provide lots of services. Users simply access the site map, click on the appropriate link and the right page appears before the right reader. Cool.

Cooler still? SE spiders love site maps. They gobble them up and google them out. SE spiders crawl sites anywhere from once every 48 hours (Yahoo) to once every two weeks (Google). Creating a site map enables you to add or delete site features that will then be picked up quickly by crawlers. So, not only does a site map increase accessibility, it also gets site changes picked up a whole lot faster.

Navigation
Navigation is the tools used to move about your site — links, buttons, scroll bars, dropdown menus, etc. All navigation devices should be well labeled, and just as importantly, labeled with consistency. If you label a red navigation button ‘Click Here’ on the home page, all similar links should show the same text, in the same font and in the same color…and if possible, in the same location on the computer screen. Your visitors may not pick up on this little courtesy, but they sure will appreciate it.

Keep It Simple
Unless you’re writing about the uses of nanotechnology in mapping the human genome, keep it simple. People don’t want to be hit with a bunch of $10 words. Design your text to be read by an eighth grader. The eighth graders will love you, and those reading at higher levels will appreciate the simplicity.

One final thought — and an important one, at that. Accessibility isn’t a one-time thing. It’s not something you do when you design and launch your site — it’s a process, not an end-result.

SE algos are tweaked often and changed frequently, so what may be accessible today may not be so accessible tomorrow. Also, as you start to hear back from visitors, you’ll discover the weaknesses in your site’s design — maybe even a dead end that requires the user to back out of your site. Now, that’s not going to be a very happy buyer.

Review your site regularly for accessibility issues. Listen to your customers (and anyone else, for that matter). Ask your digitally challenged Uncle Jim to navigate your site. If you get questions like, “What do I do now?” or “What does this thing-a-ma-bob do?” you’ve identified accessibility issues that should be addressed. Thanks Uncle Jim, care for some coffee?

SEO: search engine optimized (or optimization depending on its use in a sentence). Simply put. SEO is building your site, adapting your site, reworking your site after beta testing and, ultimately maintaining your site to ensure the best PR (PageRank) you site can achieve within its ‘keyword competitors’ — other sites using the same or similar keywords you use. Simple concept — get the most traffic by having the highest ranking on Google’s SERPs — search engine results pages. Isn’t SEO FUN?

So what are the elements that you (or your site design firm) should play close attention to when putting together your dream site. Bring this list with you when talking to your designer so you can have confidence the designer’s aware that you’re aware.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here’s what you and/or your designer should be concerned with to make sure your site is friendly to spiders when they start checking out RubberChickensЯUs.com.

Research Your Keywords
Keywords are words you provide the SE to give the SE an idea of what your site is like and, in this case, little things mean a lot. We did a recent test search on the key words ‘create paper airplanes’ and ‘build paper airplanes’ on Google and Yahoo! and the results were staggering. ‘Create’ generated over a hundred pages of SERPs while ‘Build’ delivered fewer than 40…and it’s a whole lot easier to increase Page Rank when you don’t have as many competitors. The difference between the key words ‘build’ and ‘create’ could actually make or break a site, so when it comes to keywords, little things do mean a lot, so do the research and make danged sure you designer does, too.

Getting Noticed
Your new site will, most likely, be noticed by an SE when you submit all pertinent information about each site. Part of that information includes the two- or three-line blurb describing your site (The best source for hand-carved gnomes anywhere west of Los Angeles, blah, blah). Another key bit of information is key words — the 8 — 10 words and phrases that best describe your site. So, for your gnome site, your research might show the following as a good starting point: hand-carved gnomes, gnomes, novelty gifts, unusual gifts, garden gnomes — you get the idea. Again, do your research when it comes to keyword selection and SE submission.

Getting Linked Up
More and more of the big SEs are developing more and more sophisticated means of determining a site’s rank. Yes, SEO, keyword rich text still counts, but not as much as it did in 1993 when the first SE hit the cyber scene (thanks, Yahoo!). Today, SEs look at things like the quality of inbound links. Let’s say you’re selling prescription glasses over the I-Net — an optician site. To really make friends with SE spiders, you need quality in-bound links from sites related to your site. An in-bound link from a building supply company isn’t going to help because it doesn’t help the user! However, links from a sunglasses specialty site, an on-line contact lens retailer and Visine are going to send you to the top of the heap in no time.

Remember: Garbage links unrelated to your site — bad. Quality in-bound links good. Very, very good.

Freshen Up Your Site
SEs love sites that offer regular, up-dated information of benefit to visitors. The new content doesn’t have to be SEO text (aka garbage) but it does have to be on a topic of interest to a visitor to your site. To get noticed, be sure to work key words into the title of the piece, sub-heads and other pointers used by the reader to identify useful information.

HTML Tags
HTML is the coding language used between your site and an SE. Part of the programming includes the insertion of title tags and Meta tags. SEs gobble of HTML tags like M&Ms. Make sure you (or your developer who should already know this but may not) take full advantage of HTML tags for key word placement. Also, you can change key words in these SE signposts easily, so if one set of keywords isn’t pulling in the throngs you were expecting, change ‘em.

The All-Important, SE Spider Friendliness Test
Once the site is constructed and has been up and running for at least 30 days (it takes that long for some SEs to catch up on all of the site submissions received every day — like a bazillion!), it’s time to do a few test runs. Now, first your designer should have software that will check to see just how spider-friendly you are, but there are other tools, as well — for free. Go to the Google home page, click on ‘About Google’ and check out the tools Google provides to site owners like you. You can even see how your site looks to the Google SE and make a lot of useful adjustments for cheap — and that’s always a good thing.

The facts speak for themselves. Studies show that 90% of visitor traffic is going to reach your site via a search engine. More than 50% of your total transactions will be made by people who Googled you. And, studies have shown that developing a spider-friendly site does more to improve ROI than virtually anything else you can do. So forget key word density and SEO text. Get friendly with the spiders and your PR will soon be at the top of the web.

You can have the best-designed site on the planet, but if its design denies widespread access by potential visitors (and potential buyers) you’re going to lose business, as in $$$$$.

Accessibility begins with the use of open standards in the design of your site — standards adopted by the W3 Consortium to unify site programming to add both stability and durability to the Internet. By complying with these open standards, your site will be accessible to the widest range of I-net users employing the widest variety of means to track down your site. That means that a visitor using a 10-year-old modem and a 12-inch monitor will have access to your site just as easily (though more slowly) than the user who connects up on super fast Web TV. To learn more about the W3C open standards, see the article in the May, ’05 archives. It’ll give you all the details.

But, there’s more to accessibility than the use of open standards. The fact is, you don’t know who’s going to be visiting your site, so you have to be ready for just about anyone. It’s a question of ethics, good marketing and the law.

Check this out: Over in the UK, in 1999, the government passed a law called the Disability Discrimination Act which states that all purely informational sites should be accessible by people with disabilities. The country’s Disability Rights Commission (DRC) has recently undertaken investigations into how well sites have complied with the 1999 statute.

While no such law exists in the US to date, it’s coming. As well it should. Just as we provide accessibility features to public buildings for people with disabilities, the same considerations should be given to Internet users with disabilities. And while the current and up-coming laws focus on informational sites, as opposed to commercial sites, you can bet that accessibility compliance will be a factor within the commercial sector of the Net as well. It’s simply a matter of time.

So, as a site owner (or soon-to-be-site-owner) what does this mean to you? Well, it means you need to expand your view of your on-line enterprise to offer the widest accessibility, so that people with vision problems, mobility problems and other disabilities can use your site as effectively and as easily as anyone else.

For example, does your site offer text that can be adjusted for size. Today’s mouse comes with a scroll wheel. When a user presses the control key and scrolls the mouse wheel, text size changes (assuming the browser and web site both have this feature). To see how this feature works for low-vision users, visit the Microsoft site at microsoft.com. Text can be made larger or smaller simply by using the scroll wheel on your mouse, making text readable to many more users.

Large links buttons, large type fonts and other adaptations can be built into the design of a new site, or updated on an existing site. But why go to the expense? Well, for one thing, it’s the right thing to do. You establish yourself as a ‘good Internet citizen’ by building an all-inclusive site — a site where everyone is welcomed. Would you vote down money to build a wheelchair ramp for your local library? Of course not. Building that ramp is the right thing to do, just as updating your site to make it more accessible is the ethically right thing to do.

From a purely business POV, increasing your site’s accessibility just makes good marketing sense. How many sales are you losing because elderly visitors can’t read your 8-point font product descriptions? How many potential visitors are you losing waiting for the 5-minute download of 10 Flash animations on their old Pentium 66 computers. Lots. About 50% of computer users upgrade every 3 years as newer, faster systems come to market. That leaves 50% of users still working with their 256 Colecos — and they’re not going to wait for that download. Oh, and you just lost another sale.

From a legal standpoint, a ‘right-thing-to-do’ standpoint and from a marketing standpoint, improving accessibility to your site just makes good sense.

So, to help you get started, here are some simple steps you can follow to improve the accessibility of your site:

• Review the W3C open standards (May, ’05) and make sure your site is in compliance.
• Carefully examine each page of your site for readability issues. Small type, unusual type fonts and even color scheme all have an impact on readability.
• You don’t have to upgrade your entire site all at once. Start with the home page, move on to landing pages and work your way through each page over time. At least you’re moving in the right direction!
• When adding pages, determine that they comply with W3C’s accessibility standards.
• Beta test your site on a variety of systems, using different browsers, monitors and platforms.
• Use HTML or XHTML for all new site development to ensure the broadest access across the user spectrum.
• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for faster downloads.

Also, check out the article in the July, ’05 archive on creating a user-friendly site for even more suggestions on how to make every visitor to your site feel welcomed.

Whether you’re an e-tailer, site designer/developer/marketer, a site host, a Google shareholder or just someone who downloads tunes to his I-Pod, you want Internet standards (though you may not realize it).

Ever since the Internet became the Internet, there’s been a strong need for standardization of I-net protocols — a uniform code, a set of rules and regs that applies across the full spectrum of e-commerce — from developer to seller to consumer. Why? Use some off-brand, proprietary software to construct your site and six months from now, you won’t be recognized by certain browsers, or visitors to your site will have to do a hard reboot because their computers lock up when they set foot in your cyber-store. Without standardization, e-commerce will continue to grow in different directions using a variety of standards — different programming languages, different or improper use of existing program metrics, or worse, personal preferences that become outdated by lunchtime. So, what are the benefits of open standards across the board? There are a lot of them.

Durability
When you spend beaucoup bucks to have a site developer design your e-commerce enterprise, you want it to be as viable 10 years from now as it is the day you launch. Compliant standards will ensure that your XHTML title tags are still recognized in 2015 by the great-grandson of Google — SuperMegaGoogle III.

Broad-Based Benefits
You don’t know who’s going to drop in to browse your site. You won’t know what capabilities their computers have, what browser they’re using or how computing will change. I-net standards are designed to provide the most benefits to the most web users as possible. This will better enable hardware designers and manufacturers to equip computers with the technologies agreed to via I-net standards.

Site Access From Cell Phones, PDAs and ESP
Who knows what the future holds for the world of e-commerce? Open standards will enable sites to be accessed by a variety of devices — cell phones, wireless hookups, PDAs and, who knows, maybe even ESP. If we’re all working to the same set of standards, adapting web technology to other electronic devices becomes much simpler for the designers of those devices.

And, does anyone doubt that new devices will be developed, enabling you to access everything from your e-mail to the status of your Amazon order by way of your ATM, TV set, satellite radio, GPS or, yes, even ESP. (It could happen.)

Lower Development Costs
If we’re all writing lines of code using the same protocols, designers won’t have to spend the extra time to make sure their sites run and look good on AOL, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista and MSN. Uniformity across the Net will ensure that a gif is a gif is a gif, regardless of what browser the user uses. Updates to existing sites will be simpler (read less costly) and won’t require some MIT brainiac to implement them.

Increased Flexibility
From site design and redesign, to hosting, to access, a standardized approach might seem to limit flexibility by adding constraints — a list of do’s and don’ts — but, in fact, just the opposite is true. Here’s an analogy: writers (the good ones, at least) adhere to a set of conventions called spelling, grammar and punctuation. This enables all of us to understand and utilize what we read because in every case, a comma is used to separate items in a list.

Now, because these rules apply, writers can be sure the reader will understand the text, and because of that knowledge, writers actually have more flexibility in what they write. The same is true of I-standards — the spelling, grammar and punctuation of the Internet. The Internet is an amorphous, expanding collection of stores, information sites, entertainment and game sites, downloadable e-books and applications — the list is endless and still growing. If standards are applied across the board, as a collection of individual e-entities, the Internet will grow in new directions (increased flexibility), offering new, better, more useful services because the entire Internet community can focus on improving the Net as a whole, rather than spending time, energy and money making sure their piece of the Internet puzzle fits in its proper place.

So What Does This Mean to You?
There’s no law (yet) that requires the use of open Internet standards. It’s a voluntary movement, as it should be, but a movement that is gaining momentum and support from the entire Internet community. There’s an “It’s about time.” sentiment that pervades e-commerce and support industries, such as digital design and development.

The World Wide Web Consortium, better known as W3C, is made up of expert, professionals from the four corners of the on-line world, and together, these opinion leaders have compiled and published a list of standards as a starting point — a first step, if you will. The list (shown below) establishes a standard language, coding protocols, and a list of what W3C calls ‘best practices’, which include the validity/viability of code, the use of semantically correct code and code that is accessible to everyone from designers and site owners to browsers and non-computer electronics.

So what does all of this mean to you? Well, if you’re planning to launch a site of your own, determine that the designer you’ve chosen is up-to-speed on these standards and, more importantly, understands that you want your site constructed to these standards.

If you’re a site developer, it means that you might have to pull out your old HTML manual to brush up on your semantics. An essential aspect of open standards is the development of semantically correct codes, using HTML operators for the purpose they were intended, while avoiding the creation of HTML elements intended to have the appearance of something else, i.e. using a paragraph element to generate a list instead of actually using a list element. Think of HTML semantics as the rules of grammar for coding. You may not want to learn them, but they’re a necessary aspect of your profession.

Finally, if you’re just an Internet user, web surfer, downloading consumer, you really don’t have to do anything except sit back, wait for uniform standards to take hold and get more from your on-line experiences than ever before. Access, stability, durability and an end to planned obsolescence. With voluntary, open standards, your 10-year-old browser will still be tracking down the sites you’re after — no upgrades required.

Open Standards Developed by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Structural Languages:
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) 1.0
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0
XHTML 1.1

Scripting Language:
ECMAScript 262

Presentation Languages:
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 1-3

Additional Presentation Languages (Markup):
MathML 2.0
Mathematical Markup Language 1.01
Scalable Vector Graphics 1.0

Object Models:
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 (core)
DOM Level 2

In many respects, the world wide web is pretty much a wild place with spotty oversight and more scallywags and neer-do-wells doing shoddy work, trying to beat the system and increase their PageRank and presence — oh, and increase sales, too.

Then there are the problems of compatibility — you’ve got such a large code set from which to choose — HTML, XHTML, XLC, et al, that compatibility issues will only continue to confuse the matter more.

Imagine the world of widgets, a niche market but one with potential. Any way, all the widget makes get together one day and agree that from henceforth all widgets will only be constructed using #3 hex bolts. What a break-through in the manufacturing of widgets. Unit costs drop because no special bolts are needed. Interchangeability becomes easier. Upgrades are a snap and, in one very obvious sense, the world of widgets has become-just a little bit closer.

Anyway, you get the point. There are business benefits — today — to jumping on the bandwagon and starting to use open standards in your site development work.

Look, here’s how it breaks down, strictly from the bottom line POV:

Increased Accessibility
Using open standards in the development or upgrade of your site increases user accessibility by eliminating incompatibilities in older browsers and by being compliant with the protocols of cellular e-mail and the integration of other communications systems — today and in the future.

In other words, by designing your site to be compliant, you’re making it easier to adapt to new technologies as they become available:

• access to your site from your cell
• e-mail from anywhere, any time
• easy access to the ever-more popular hand-held computers (which work with a full-bore Windows OS)
• on-line order-taking from cell phone customers

All of these integrated functions have any easier time finding your site when it’s been built to industry standards. It brings just a bit of law and order to the lawless www.

Up and Running Faster Simplified Maintenance
One aspect of open standards involves separating XHTML (the text) of your site from the graphic elements. This allows for just about anyone to develop the text using simple meta tags — <div>, <p>, etc. So what? Well, with tags pointing to a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), you’ve begun to super-charged your site.

In addition, the client can easily develop all of the text and back end content while the designer is putting together the architecture. By divvying up the work, and with parallel site development you ensure that your site is up and running sooner — an especially critical consideration when you’re financing this out of your own pocket and it’s time to get some inflow to offset the outgo, or at least slow down your burn rate. In other words, open standards will make site design more efficient, easier, faster and less costly.

On the maintenance side, a uniform set of building modalities will ensure easy maintenance and revisions to any site. Modules that conform to the site standards can be plugged in quickly (read cheaply), changing the look and lowering the cost of routine site maintenance.

More Sites in Less Time
Web-compliant browsers have forced site designers to rethink everything from the bottom up. These browsers’ (now approximately 95% of all browsers sold today) use of open standards has forced us all to discard the old rule of ‘every site for itself’ and begin the process of standardization.

From the purely proactive perspective, many clients are setting up multiple sites for various test marketings, among other things. So, a standard code, used by the entire hard hat I-net population simplifies replication of sites within different SEs. In other words, open standards will allow you to do more work in less time because you won’t be confronted with compatibility hassles.

Reduced Hosting Costs
By segregating text from other site elements, and by eliminating extraneous under-performing site functions, you’ll take up less cyber space, lowering your monthly costs for hosting services. In effect, open standards are more efficient standards and as such, will lower bandwidth, saving you money every month — money that adds up over time.

Much Happier Visitors
A site that dogs loading the home page doesn’t bode well for visitor or site owner. Only 5% of visitors have the patience to sit out a 30-second download — 5%! Now, sure, broadband has made the problem less of a problem, but there are still a lot of users still running old, clunky, dial-up modems.

By simplifying code and optimizing your site for speed, each visitor will have a more positive experience. No one wants to wait for downloads any more. Simplify and give your site some impact — without losing anything in the way of appearance or user features. After all, even on the www, the customer is always right.

So Should You Or Shouldn’t You?
You’ve got a site. It’s up and running, no complaints about traffic, it looks good and you spent big bucks getting it that way. And changing over to open standards — HTML, XHTML and CSS is going to be a costly proposition — not millions, but more than putting on a new roof. So, the question becomes: should I spend the money to develop a compliant website, or hold on to what I’ve got?

Obviously, only you can answer that question depending on your site income, current PR, inbound links and other cyber considerations. But do bear in mind that the movement to establish open standards for site development isn’t losing steam. In fact, it’s gaining momentum.

Is it something you have to do today? No. Next week? Uh-uh. Ever? Yes. At some point it’s going to make quantifiable business sense (read more $$$) to develop a standards compliant site. Do it now and enjoy immediate benefits — faster load times, a more vigorous, active site, an improved visitor experience, lower bandwidth costs and adaptability in the future.