Over the last 3 months we've been involved in a consultancy role which has seen us independently review the websites of around 30 companies in the Midlands. During this time we've noticed the same issues time and time again which are preventing companies from realising their online potential. This post will outline the most common issues we come across.

Domain Ownership

With domain name prices so low, many people don't realise the value of them - we have noticed a worrying trend that some domain names have been registered in the name of web design agencies, free website providers or individuals rather than the company which should have ownership of them. This could cause problems if the company wishes to change provider in the future, or if one of these "upstream" providers goes bust, as you may not be then legally entitled to it. Domain names may only cost a few pounds, but have you considered what would happen if you no longer had ownership of yours?

No Visitor Data

If you are not monitoring and reacting to the way users interact with your website then you could be missing opportunities. Are sections of your site receiving a lot of views but not converting into enquiries or sales? Is one particular page causing users to drop off? Which keywords are bringing visitors to your site via search engines? Google provide a fully capable Analytics suite for free, so there is no reason you shouldn’t know the answers to all of these questions!

Legislation

Limited companies, as part of The Companies Act 2006, must display the following on all official documentation, including their website:

• The part of the United Kingdom in which the company has its registered office (i.e. England and Wales, or Wales, or Scotland, or Northern Ireland)
• The company’s registered number
• The address of the company’s registered office

It is also a requirement for VAT registered companies to display their registration number on their website – even if it is not being used for e-commerce transactions

Sites which capture user information should also have a privacy policy which states what personal information the site is collecting and how the company will disclose, retain, process and purge this information.

Accessibility

A Company has to ensure that it complies with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA). The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it illegal for a website provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide a service that is generally available, providing a service of a lower standard, or failing to comply with a duty to make reasonable adjustments.

Blind and partially sighted people use software called “Screen Readers” that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen and re-presented to the user with text-to-speech, sound icons, or a Braille output device.

For these devices to work correctly a website must be correctly structured and coded. Many websites have sections which do not adhere to this standard, in particular contact forms are quite often none compliant.

Tables based layouts

Sites rendered using HTML tables were the norm in the late 90's, as this was the only reliable way of producing the layouts required by graphic designers - but since Internet Explorer 6 brought CSS support to the mainstream in 2001 this practise has been declining, and with good reason. A tables based layout is difficult to maintain, slow to render, incompatible with many screen readers and can produce inconsistent layouts between different browsers.

Outdated Content

Search engines and users love fresh content. Having your Christmas opening hours displayed in May might be the sign of a highly efficient and well prepared company – but in reality it is likely to make visitors doubt the validity of the rest of the information on the site or even wonder if you are still in business, and search engines will re-index your site less often if every time they return there is nothing new to index.

A web content management system allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or HTML mark-up languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. Many companies still do not have access to a CMS to enable them to manage their own content, and are either still paying a web developer to do this, or not doing it at all.

Poor Document Structure

The HTML specification has specific tags for various purposes - and one of these is a set of header tags. These tags range from <h1> to <h6> which descend in importance. These headings can be styled and also image replaced to follow company branding – rather than using normal images for this. A document with well written and meaningful headers will keep your reader interested, help them navigate the sections of a page and also improve rankings in search engines. Some sites that don’t follow this don’t even rank for their own company name, let alone any general terms likely to bring in new business.

None Descriptive Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important parts a website. They contain the text that is displayed at the top of the web browser window, but also more importantly as the clickable links in search engine results. The search engines also pay close attention to the words in these tags, and these are a big part of the ranking algorithm. Many sites we are seeing have the same title on each page, usually just the company name – by changing these to include keywords you can make them more likely to appear in the search engines and also be more likely to be clicked.

Duplicate Content

Search engines have implemented filters to try and remove pages from their indexes that are exact replicas of other pages, as these have usually been created to try and receive higher rankings. If you wrote your content from scratch then you don’t need to worry about this, right? Wrong. If your site is being hosted incorrectly then you could still be being penalised by the duplicate content filter.

If your website is being hosted on two domains then this is a real possibility. The content will be indexed on both domains, but only the first instance found will count – so the total value of all of your content could be shared between these two domains. We’ve seen sites move up 10’s of positions in search engine results after fixing these sort of errors.

Does your website fall foul of any of these? Are you not sure? Contact us to see how we can help you turn your website from a brochure into a sales tool that delivers.

At Bright Fox we embrace clean, valid and accessible CSS and HTML, so code all of our sites by hand (with the help of some great open source programs such as Notepad++) To enable us to keep our development process as lean as possible we have developed some tools that automate some of the most common CSS and HTML patterns.

These tools have helped us save countless hours of our developers time (and sanity!) - and over the next few months we are going to be releasing them, for free.

When we analysed the coding process, by far and away the most common action performed was creating the CSS for an image replacement. Once the site has been sliced and the creation of the code begins - each image was re-opened in an image editor to determine the height and width, and the code created by hand.

We created a small program which opens an image, reads the file name, height and width and copies the information into a template and then into the clipboard. This is installed onto our development machines and added to the right-click context menu allowing easy execution.

You can download this program, along with the source code from http://www.brightfoxsolutions.com/Web-Design-Software.aspx - let us know if you find it useful!

1) Creating the HTML

I’ve seen a few ways to do a nested navigation, there’s many ways of doing it, but with the emphasis on keeping the code lean, I’ll show you how to manipulate each element just by using a single id namely (#nav) on the parent ul element, what’s more I’ll show you how to make it accessible to screen readers and browsers that don’t use javascript! Without further ado let’s create our funktastic accessible navigation with jQuery, so put a brew on and then read on.

To start with copy and paste the HTML below or enter it yourself, this is pretty simple here all we are doing its creating two nested unordered lists. The number of nested lists is up to you, but this example only works with just the one.

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