Web design practices that may increase the usability of a web design and would also contribute to a better Semantic web.
Managing a web site has become so easier these days. Anyone can just get online and buy a domain name plus hosting, anyone can auto install an open source CMS such as joomla or wordpress, and within minutes anyone can start publishing content. This is wonderful, such freedom and such openness was never observed by the mankind. These great communication tools are actually a big leap in the history of communication and speech.
However, the web is growing at extremely fast speeds. Each day millions of new web pages are published. Hundreds of Indexes are maintained across the globe to keep track of all these web pages and to make them publicly accessible. Still, hundreds and thousands of websites are those that do not appear on these indexes or buried so deeply that are almost inaccessible. In this article we discuss how ordinary web publishers who are not experts in programming, coding, or writing web documents; can contribute towards building a web that is accessible and usable.
The foremost important thing on a web site is not just the content; it is the web design that makes the content readable and accessible. A bad web design makes the content inaccessible or unusable which ultimately kills the purpose of publishing to the web. Sharing information and data is not good enough, this information and data should be wrapped under a nice web design.
What exactly is a nice web design?
A nice web design take cares of two kinds of visitors or readers. The first kind is the human web surfer and the second kind is crawlers, bots, and machines reading your content and storing information about its availability. A Good web design takes care of the both. It makes your content readable by readers and also by machines. It helps both the machine and human visitors to understand the content.
Why it is important that we should make our web design machine readable? Well first of all it improves your search engine ranking, this means that you appear more prominently in the search results if someone searches for the information you are sharing. Secondly, it helps the indexes like search engines and other organizations to collect data about the web, its growth, what kind of information is published and how the access to the web can be made easier.
A good web design makes sure that colors are right for human eyes. Fonts are not too small or too large, the web design is follows the guidelines provided by standardizing organizations such as W3C. Check your links to make sure there are no broken links. Add page with the contact information of the publisher of the website, add an about page, add features like search so that your site’s human visitors can find more information and Share this buttons so that the information can be shared by your human visitors to their social networks.
A better web design for machines and search engines should have proper keywords in the title tag, keyword meta tag and description tag. The headings should be made clearer and the textual content should be available for machines to reach on web documents where there is no text content, just graphic content such as images or videos.
Keeping the web clutter by simply using some common web design practices would help all of us eventually. More information will be shared, more information will be published and more information will be accessible to the mankind. Just building the library is not enough we all need to make sure that we work towards a web that is accessible to everyone.
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