IE7 Web Developers Nightmare

January 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment

IT Gears has an interesting article on IE7 incompatibilities.

Looks like the author ran into a few more of the incompatiblities that I have, although I was very displeased at the look of some of my web sites when I first saw them under IE7.

My earlier IE7 articles talk about some of those bugs (like the one with the center tag).

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Visitor Experience

Easy SEO Tips for Web Site Owners

December 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Some easy Search Engine Optimization tips (SEO tips) for helping search engines find and understand your web pages:

Use H1 header tags for your page titles. Sure, graphical images may be prettier, but search engines can not read the text in graphics. Search engines look at the H1 and the Title tag, both, as a base for understanding and classifying the content of a web page.
Do not use the same title for each page. Change your title on each page. The title tag sets the words that show in the top blue bar in IE/Firefox/etc. Again, the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN key to those, too.
Use “alt” tags in all your images. Add them. Alt tags are important for these reasons.:
- (a) the search engines use the alt tag to understand pictures,
- the HTMl standards require them for all images,
- they are what people using non-graphical browsers, including text web browsers and screen-reading visual-assistance devices, use to show (or say) in place of the image,
- if your image doesn’t display for any reason, the alt tag will be displayed, and
- IE treats title tags a little differently than do the Firefox, Opera, Netscape and Safari web browsers, when hovering over an image..
Use a title tag for a web page, make sure that the words are pertinent to the image — and contain pertinent keywords from that page. Do not “stuff keywords” into the tags, unless you want the search engines to penalize you.
if you use a title variable in your image tags, make sure that the words are pertinent to the image — and contain pertinent keywords from that page. Do not “stuff keywords” into the tags, unless you want the search engines to penalize you.
If you have a static image in your header, make it into a link. Link it to your Home page. Ititle tag saying “Home” to the Insurance Writer logo, say “Insurance Writer - Specialty Risk Control - Home Page”. Then, turn the image into a link to the home page — not just a static image.
Duplicate the “alt” tags as “title” tags.
Have a sitemap.xml file.

Google defined an XML protocol for sitemaps. Yahoo and MSN recently announced that they will recognize and use the same protocol.

Yahoo already supports the sitemap.xml file format, too. MSN has said they will, too, but their implementation is not ready yet.

Sitemaps are the best way for you to tell the search engines the sites and all the web pages you have. Each site requires its own sitemap.xml file, by the way. And, if you didn’t realize it, the search engines recognize subdomains as “different sites.”

That is, http://seo.drawingontheweb.com (if it existed) would be recognized as a different site by the search engines. Sometimes that’s a pain. Other times, it’s a neat feature. It entirely depends upon you and what you’re trying to do at the time…

Here’s an short blog entry of mine with pointers to Google’s and Yahoo’s sitemap.xml instructions

After checking out a few alternatives, I’m using the free program GSiteCrawler (www.gsitecrawler.com) to create my sitemaps.

I have more than doubled my visitors from search engines in the last 2 months after adding sitemaps. I’ve posted more in my blogs, too, but I think the sitemaps were the major impact.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under HTML, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic & Linking

I Hate IE7!

November 19, 2006 | Leave a Comment

For an “improved web browser,” Internet Explorer 7 has much in common with a stubborn mule. No matter what you want to do, it doesn’t want to do it right now.

If you happened to visit my Terry’s Computer Tips web site late this afternoon, you might have seen what I mean…

I made some tweaks to the site and was very happy with the results in Firefox. Then, I checked the pages in Opera. Again, it was great.

But, then I looked at it with IE7 — and found a mess.

Whether it was the absolute positioning changes that I was making, or perhaps a missing or extra <div> tag, or a glitch in the JavaScript, IE7 threw away almost all the content on the page and then laid out the rest of the page in a mess. Yet, Opera and Firefox displayed the pages perfectly.

I couldn’t revert to the earlier version fast enough to suit me — but I got there.

Gee, and I thought the strangenesses of IE6 were bad — at least it would usually display the contents in almost the right location.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Opera, Usability, Visitor Experience

IE7 Bug: Bulleted Lists

November 13, 2006 | Leave a Comment

I wrote the other day about the IE7 Center tag bug. IE6, Firefox 1.5.0.7, Firefox 2.0, and Opera all displayed the pages exactly the same. And, then IE7 came along…

Bulleted lists were the first thing that I found that IE7 displayed differently from IE6, Firefox and Opera.

IE7’s default indent for bulleted lists appears to be about 60 pixels, where the others defaulted to about 8 pixels.

Where did I see the problem? In one of my WordPress blogs, where I used bulleted lists for some of the entries I had added to the sidebar.

All of a sudden, the bullets moved from the left side of the DIV, all the way to the middle of the 140 pixel wide sidebar.

After experimentation, I finally solved the problem by defining the margin-left and padding-left on both the UL and LI tags. Interestingly, I also had to define the list-style-type for the UL tag.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, Opera

IE7 Web Design Issue: Centering

November 11, 2006 | 2 Comments

I’ve run into two problems that were fine in IE6, in Firefox and Opera, but that display poorly in IE7.

First, the <center> tag.

Yes, it has been deprecated for a while in favor of a <div align=”center”>. And, then, current recommendations call for creating a enclosing <div>and applying margin:auto or margin-right:auto; margin-left:auto.

But, this gets rather hairy very quickly.

With IE6, the easiest way to center a page was to use a <center /> tags. Firefox and Opera went along quietly and all was well, until IE7 came along.

Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t like <center> tags, at least with the combinations of DIVs I was using on my www.TerrysComputerTips.com site.

Although my pages are fixed now (by removing the <center> and </center> tags), IE7 initially took this same beautifully centered page — and right-aligned the DIV at a page width of about 1400 pixels.

Where it got that number, I don’t know. Idenfifying the problem was easy.

Identifying the solution wasn’t — who would have thought that removing the <center> and </center> tags would make the page center properly?

I’m not sure how I found it, other than shooting at the problem with a “what affects the whole page…that I can change” approach. But, that was it.

It’s time to lose the <center> tag.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, Opera, Usability, Visitor Experience

Powweb Sale Continues

November 1, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Powweb, my web host of choice, offered a special during October — 25% off of their regular $7.77/month price for one- and two-year web-hosting purchases.

Their web site announced that the sale is back by popular demand. New users can purchase the One Plan for only $5.77/month for their initial 1-year or 2-year purchase.

I’m hosting 10 active domains — and some subdomains, too — in one Powweb package. The One Plan package allows unlimited domains to be hosted in an account. That’s a huge benefit at this small price.

The Powweb One Plan features 20GB space, 13GB/day throughput, PHP, Perl, MySQL, FrontPage Extensions, Blog software, forum software, shopping cart packages, photo galleries and a lot more, all for that one price.

I thought the deal was great at $93.24 per year ($7.77 per month), but at $69.24, it’s a fantastic deal — plus, they’ve got a 30-day money-back guarantee.

All my sites are hosted at Powweb

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Apache Web Server, Blogs, CSS, HTML, PHP Scripting, Web Hosting

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