Sonet Journal

A large part of SEO takes place in the structure of the website. There are many facets to this. One of them, and especially if part of the job calls for redevelopment is to get a site cross-browser friendly especially if you don’t want to lock out any group from viewing your website. While Internet Explorer is still the widely used web browser, there are also browsers such as Opera, Firefox, Konquerer and Safari, to name a few.

No Tables

Part of the redevelopment or ‘from scratch’ development is building with no tables or ripping out existing tables, while tables is no longer a real hindrance, it helps to have a tableless environment. Not only for super-speed crawling of a website but it also aids in other areas such as accessibility, future proofing for the Mobile Web etc.

Cross Browser

Our site Southbourne Internet is coming up for redevelopment soon and this time we really want to ‘push the boat out’ in design, mobile small device build we have some neat ideas we would like to implement and are looking closely at integrating a small publishing platform that sits tightly with the main business website. I feel the future of business sites is having an integrated solution so that blog publishing can easily be integrated into a website ‘on the fly.’ Anyway, I digress… back to cross browser friendliness. I decided to test our current site in some of the latest browsers on the latest Operating systems. For this I use BrowserCam which we have had a membership for quite a while now.

BrowserCam

The way BrowserCam works is its set up to take a snapshot of your site on different Operating systems and web browsers. It’s a geat way of seeing how your site easily looks to others. A real handy tool that should be firmly in your toolbox.

I took the following snaps this evening of our current site at Southbourne Internet, we seemed to pass everything, our site is built with no tables and it was tough call with the main image on the home page as every time we thought we got working it broke in another browser. Eventually we prevailed except for a slight hitch in Konquerer that lifts the image from it’s holder a tiny bit.

Internet Explorer 7.0 Windows-Vista

Konqueror 3.4.0-5-Linux Fedora Core

Safari 2.0 Mac-OSX 10.4

As stated above that IE still leads the way in browser use, it is worth mentioning that other markets smallermay use different browsers, and a site should be ready to handle those browsers and especially if it helps increase the ROI for a site.

Matt Cutts has written a post about his new Captcha that is now accessible and will make it harder for ‘Spam Bots’ to dump nasty comments on his blog. What Matt has implemented is quite a neat idea as it allows the visitor when posting a comment to answer a small maths question to ensure validation of a ‘live human’ such as the following example:

Sum of 5 + 7 ?

There is a slight problem with this captcha. that given a few hours most programmers could sit and write a script that would defeat Matt’s Captcha validation and extract the two numbers from the question probably after a few hours.
Furthermore once this is widely used then the protection goes as it becomes even easier for a bot to challenege the script (or rather worthwhile).
Matt could look at the following for an idea where it set up with about 5 or 6 lines of text like this:

“Thank you for reading the Matt Cutt’s blog
and interest in this post ‘changed my captcha
Please feel welcome to leave a relevant comment.
Thanks for writing!”

Question: “What is the seventh word on the third paragraph?
Choose a letter from this word?”
This would work quite well, while it is a bit more tedious it would certainly be harder for a Spam Bot to break. Having said that, nothing is safe online whatever you come up
with there will always be something there to break it (eventually).
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Related Reading
Changed my Captcha by Matt Cutts