Posts Tagged ‘web standards’

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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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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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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