Archive for the ‘css styles’ Category

Flourishing financial websites, but with invalid CSS/HTML November 11th, 2009

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Along with the explosive increase of the Web and flourishing financial websites that deal with a variety of topics such as payday loans, stock exchange, forex and real estate, companies have realized the profits that wait for those eager to build a strong online presence. When they decide to publish a financial website on the Internet, companies are able to build their brand, market their products, support any existing customers, release publicity pieces, and even take orders. However, very often lost in the fast pace of growth has been an eye on the influence that their current web-building business will exert on the bottom line and the perspectives of their online presence. Remember that not only does your website financial content have a significant influence on your company’s income but so does the way your website itself is created.

Preparing your site with necessary commitment to web standards – and continuously testing to ensure it keeps constant compliance to those standards – can save your business much money and possibly increase income generated by your website.

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The webstandards way of dealing with finances online November 6th, 2009

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There are some advisable practices that allow you to obtain a more flexible and reasoned approach to developing a financial website. This approach to financial content is based on standards devised by organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These involve various concepts (that deal not only with money, loans and real estate), yet they all share the crucial idea of proper separation of presentation of financial data from structured content and from the behavior level of the user interface. These three levels are all potentially interconnected to the backend software running your financial website when they should not be. Modern, W3C standards advise the implementation of the three levels as follows, encompassing structured content, presentation, and behavior:

Structured Financial Content should involve valid HTML or XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) in order to mark up your content and forms (for example loan application forms). Such markup needs to be semantically built and entirely devoid of any presentation or behavior data.

Presentation of financial data should involve the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Style sheets contain all necessary presentation information for all your financial websites and applications. This presentation layer should never be incorporated directly in your CMS or application logic with the exception of references to the files, classes, and IDs.

Behavior: usually JavaScript (aka ECMAScript). Modern JavaScript has the ability to be implemented in an unobtrusive manner, using only external files and the W3C Document Object Model (DOM) instead of any kind of proprietary code. Moreover, it never contains any references to presentation of financial data directly, but instead gets and sets classes which point back to the CSS. While connected with the CMS or application layers of your money management software, no JavaScript should ever be inline or intermingled with this code directly.

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How proper CSS & HTML coding affects your online business November 4th, 2009

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Currently Internet witnesses increased complexity around content management systems, accessibility, rich internet applications (RIAs), mobile, application frameworks, syndication, and other multiuse channels, each of which may require to display the presentation of financial information – or a lack of any presentation information – associated with it. In the face of this requirement, most off-the-shelf software packages are damaged by terrible UI practices, not to mention financial and money management software created individually by developers who don’t know any better. Starting with substandard WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors in many popular content management system (often used to display financial data about loans or currency values) to server-side frameworks that create code for users, the UI problems are present in all places.

The good news is that a great deal of current UI issues are almost as fixable as they are pervasive. Although the majority of people involved in the industry believe them to be inherent to Web development, the reality is that they are stubborn relics of bad practices from the 1990s that have persisted into this decade.

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Pervasive bad habits in designing financial websites November 3rd, 2009

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In the 1990s, the Browser War that broke out between two financial giants Microsoft and Netscape was a cause of the development of many proprietary technologies and techniques that today have spread across the Internet. A great deal of these technologies involved presentation of various types of information (finances, stock exchange, education, entertainment etc.) into the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) markup or implemented interactivity in a browser-specific way. What is more, developers had to deal with many problems to get a profitable design out of technologies that were not prepared to creating flexible and well-designed websites on subjects such as online loans, banking or real estate. Their numerous kluges and techniques soon became habit, then were incorporated into software, and in the end affected the software industry’s comprehension of how financial  websites should be built. Currently, over ten years later, technology and techniques have improved considerably but the specter of those 1990s techniques still remains—and it’s costing everyone a lot of money and potential clients.

Those costs of operating on financial markets online include increased development risk, expenses, and time to market, problems with brand and customer management, unnecessarily high bandwidth costs, staff turnover problems, as well as increased complexity and cost with regard to future financial websites and application of modifications. At the most basic level, these issues are too closely connected with backend software and appear in form of a bloated, technically incorrect and complex code, which does everything from damage the user experience to limit search engine results. Changes in the presentation layer of a financial (or any other) website should not put software at risk and a tiered approach, which has been a popular in the software world for years, is easily accessible by means of a more mature approach on the UI layer.

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