Posts Tagged ‘specificity’

Expand your business with web standards conformance. November 15th, 2009

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44Web standards allow you to increase the searchability of your financial sites. Google has been dubbed the greatest blind user out there on the web, because it (as well as other search engines) are particularly partial to indexing standards-compliant sites.

Break the “build, break, re-build” cycle. It is important to ensure forward compatibility of every website regardless if it concerns loans, real estate or money in general, with any new browser releases: your CSS-based financial site will be displayed accurately in future versions of today browsers. With table-based sites you never know what may happen. Along with the constant evolution of (standards compliant) browsers the performance of non-standards sites decreases. This phenomen is often described as “perpetual obsolescence”.

You can also save money by simplifying your design requirements. Compliant financial websites have an improved chance of rendering properly on all resolution and monitor sizes, while still maintaining design integrity that was originally intended for them.

Not only can you improve your income but also accquire some good publicity along the way. Creating an attractive, well-functioning and standards-compliant financial website is becoming the benchmark of good design and development of a successful company.

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Prepare your business for the future – use valid CSS and HTML November 13th, 2009

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The fact that your financial website is rendering just fine on all current browsers is no guarantee that a business site that contains invalid markup will as render fine in the future. What is more, there are no guarantee that your website will be displayed fine (or at all) in the constantly increasing number of non-traditional devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. As companies involved in the browser business make further efforts to make their products compliant to web standards, the issue of “rendering fine” in specific browsers becomes moot, anyway. Standards-compliant markup your financial website will be even more of an assurance that it will work properly on every platform in contrast to error-laden and proprietary markup.

Designing your real estate or loans website to the current level of standard indicates your website should be marked up using the so called XHTML – an XML-compatible version of plain old HMTL. If you resort to this format will allow your business to venture into the inevitable world of XML without the necessity for any significant alterations of your financial site’s structure. XML features can be added without much time and effort involved.

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Make money with web standards conformance of your site November 9th, 2009

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Designing your financial website with conformance to current standards means that – by proxy – the documents will be smaller. As a result, the pages will be displayed much faster for the users seeking data on latest currency values and loans interest. Moreover, download times have proven to be an important factor in usability of financial websites. Users often look for latest financial information (for example from stock exchange) and any perceivable delay will harm the evaluation of your website. Users tend to rate sites with slow financial data display as less interesting and offering lower quality content. Additionally, they claim that delays tend to severely interfere with task continuity, their ability to remember financial details from your site, and use flow. Really slow display of stock market information can lead users to believe some kind of error has occurred. Finally, users correlate site performance and security: financial sites that are constantly slow are considered to be less secure resources, and this is extremely important if you deal with matters such as banking, loans or forex.

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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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