Standards-Compliant Design

There are a lot of web browsers out there: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, among others. Getting a website to look and act "the same" in all of them is a nightmarish task at best. Indeed for many a "professional" website, some 1, 2, or 3 of the popular browsers won't display it "right"—and it's usually the fault of the website, not the browser.

It's not so important that a website work on every web browser in the world. But it should work on all the popular ones. In order to build such a website, one must understand and follow established standards and best practices, such as those set forth and advocated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):

XHTML 1.0 Strict Compliance

XHTML solves the many shortcomings of ordinary HTML, resulting in consistently cleaner pages and better cross-browser compatibility. The "strict" aspect of XHTML eliminates viewing problems often attributed to the use of plain HTML, such as unpredictable table-based layouts. Unlike generic HTML, XHTML content can be validated for correct design and structure. A relatively small percentage of websites on the Internet today achieve this level of compliance—but all of my designs do.

Separation of Content from Style

For small static websites, it was fine to combine the text, graphics, colors, etc. into one messy HTML document. For robust and full-fledged websites and web applications, however, this approach fails.

Instead, the appearances, or styles, of various parts of a website need to be designed separately from the website's content. This is accomplished through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Styles sheets can be reused across several websites, thereby reducing development time and cost—and allowing the builder to focus on the actual content of each website.

Unobtrusive JavaScript

JavaScript adds a level of functionality above and beyond what is available with (X)HTML alone. Examples include the automatic "clicking" of certain things like selections in a drop-down menu, the auto-completion of form fields involving dates and times, and small error messages that pop up when invalid or incomplete form data is entered.

Such things are great uses for JavaScript. However, some websites absolutely will not work unless you "turn on" JavaScript in your browser. This can be quite annoying, and often leads to browser crashes when the JavaScript code isn't well-written. These "must have JavaScript enabled" websites are usually a bad idea, because most often they are neither reliable nor robust. And usually JavaScript was over-employed in the first place due to a lack of understanding of design fundamentals.

A better idea is to utilize unobtrusive JavaScript where appropriate, and this is the approach I take. This means that a website should be complete and function fine without JavaScript, utilizing it purely to enhance the behavior of otherwise mundane aspects of the website. This also means that all JavaScript code should be—as with CSS—separate from the (X)HTML itself.

Responsible Use of Cookies

Browser cookies have earned a largely unfair reputation for somehow being "insecure." This was due mainly to older, easy-to-hack versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. Today, however, this simply isn't the case: cookies are useful and quite secure, all said.

Intended simply to enhance the user experience, cookies allow a website to store small bits of information directly on your computer, such as your favorite parts of that website for aiding in return visits, etc. More importantly, without cookies it is impossible to securely implement key features such as online shopping carts and e-commerce transactions.

That said, many websites go overboard and use cookies where they shouldn't—and worse, many websites neglect to delete certain cookies from your computer when you close your browser.

This is not so with my website designs. Each uses just a single cookie containing only a randomly generated session ID, which ensures that any information you type in on the website is viewed only by your computer—and when you close your browser, this cookie gets deleted automatically.