Posts Tagged ‘css styles’

How can my financial well-being profit from web standards? November 14th, 2009

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Web standards are frequently described as being  profitable only to various types of people with disabilities. Although helping this group is a crucial element of the standards rationale, there is a great number of other reasons why standards-based finacial websites are a mark of the future of online money making pages, not the least of which is the way they affect your bottom line and income. In the financial sector with sites concerning loans, real estate or forex trading, it is in most cases about saving some of your money. Because of that financial sites such as ESPN have got rid of all layout tables and decided on structural markup and CSS-driven layout (and saved as much as 3 terabytes of bandwidth a day) instead. The same drivers are true in case of government.

It is important to cut your financial expenses.  Standard compliant websites are in many cases less expensive to maintain, develop and run. Consequently your pages are able to be much lighter, reducing load costs in the process. There are no tables or framesets that need to be deciphered down the track – older table-based sites are especially inflexible (and expensive to keep) to any updates. As a result, your longevity improves. You also should avoid various costs of producing code forking, spacer pixels, deeply nested tables and various propriety hacks.

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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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