Ten Ways to Kill Web Bugs Dead - The Part of Tens - Beginning HTML5 & CSS3 For Dummies® (2013)

Beginning HTML5 & CSS3 For Dummies® (2013)

Part VI

The Part of Tens

22

Ten Ways to Kill Web Bugs Dead

In This Chapter

arrow Avoiding gaffes in markup and spelling

arrow Keeping links hot and fresh

arrow Gathering beta testers to check, double-check, and triple-check your site

arrow Applying user feedback to your site

After you put the finishing touches on a set of pages but before you go public on the web for the entire world to see, it’s time to put them through their paces. Testing remains the best way to ensure site quality and effectiveness.

Thorough testing must include content review, analysis of HTML and CSS syntax and semantics, link checks, and various checks to make darn sure that what’s built is what you really want. Read this chapter for gems of testing wisdom (learned from a lifetime of web adventures) as we seek to rid your web pages of bugs, errors, and lurking infelicities. Out! Out! Darned Spot!

Make a List and Check It — Twice

A sense of urgency that things must work well and look good on a website never fails to goad you to keep your site humming along. That said, if you work from a visual diagram of how your site is (or should be) organized, you’ll be well equipped to check structure, organization, and navigation. Likewise, put your pages through their paces regularly (or at least each time they change) with a spell checker, and you’ll be able to avoid unwanted tpyos.

Your design should include a roadmap (often called a site map) that tells you what’s where in every individual HTML document and style sheet in your site. The site map also clues you into the relationships among your site’s pages. Keep this map up to date as you move from design to implementation. (In our experience, things always change as you go down this path.) As you continually update your site map, be sure to include all intra- and inter-document links.

A site map provides the foundation for a test plan. Yep, that’s right — effective testing isn’t random. Use your site map to

check Investigate and check every page and every link systematically.

check Make sure everything works as you think it should — and that what you built has some relationship (however surprising) to your design.

check Define the list of things to check as you go through the testing process.

check Check everything at least twice (red suit and reindeer harness optional).

Master Text Mechanics

By the time any collection of web pages comes together, you’re looking at thousands of words, if not more. Yet many web pages are published without a spell check, which is why we suggest — no, demand — that you include a spell check as a step when testing and checking your materials. (Okay, we can’t force you, but you know it’s for your own good.) Many HTML tools, such as Aptana, Kompozer, and Dreamweaver, include built-in spell checkers, the first spell-check tools you should use. These HTML editors also know how to ignore markup and just check your text.

Even if you use HTML tools only occasionally and hack out most of your markup by hand, do a spell check before posting your documents to the web. (For a handy illustration of why this step matters, keep a log of spelling and grammatical errors you find during your web travels. Be sure to include a note on how those gaffes reflect on the people who created the pages involved. Get the message?)

tip_4c.epsYou can use your favorite word processor to spell check your pages. Before you check them, add HTML and CSS markup to your custom dictionary, and pretty soon the spell checker runs more smoothly — getting stuck only on URLs and odd strings that occasionally occur in web documents.

If you prefer a different approach, try any of the many HTML-based spell-checking services now available on the web. We like the free Lite Edition of the CSE HTML Validator (www.freehtmlvalidator.com).

If the CSE HTML Validator Lite spell checker doesn’t float your boat, visit a search engine and search for web page spell check. Doing so lets you produce a list of spell-checking tools made for web pages.

One way or another, persist until you root out all typos and misspellings. Your users may not thank you for your impeccable use of language, but if they don’t trip over errors while exploring your work, they’ll think more highly of your pages (and their creator), even if they don’t know why.

remember_4c.epsDon’t forget to put your eyeballs on the copy and thoroughly proofread the text, too. No spell checker in the world will recognize “It’s time two go too the store” as badly mangled text, although you should catch that right away. Better yet, hire a professional editor or proofreader to help out during testing.

Lack of Live Links — a Lousy Legacy

New content and active connections to current, relevant resources are the hallmarks of a well-tended website. You can’t achieve these goals without regular (sometimes, constant) effort, so plan for ongoing activity. The rewards can be huge — starting with a genuine sense of users’ excitement at what new marvels and treasures reveal themselves on their next visit to your site. Such anticipation is impossible to fake.

We performed an unscientific, random-sample test to double-check our own suspicions; users told us that positive impressions of a particular site are proportional to the number of working links they find there. The moral of this survey: Always check your links. This is as true after you publish your pages as it is before they’re made public. Nothing irritates users more than a link that produces the dreaded 404 File Not Found error instead of the good stuff they seek! Remember — link checks are as indispensable to page maintenance as they are to testing.

tip_4c.epsIf you’re long on 21st-century street smarts, hire a robot to do this job for you: They work long hours (no coffee breaks), don’t charge much, and check every last link in your site (and beyond, if you let them). The best thing about robots is that you schedule them to work at your pleasure: They always show up on time, always do a good job, and never complain (though we haven’t found one that brings homemade cookies or remembers birthdays). All you do is search online for phrases like link checker. There are lots to choose from! To begin with, you might use these:

check W3C Link Checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink): It's easy to use and less work to set up, too.

check Online Link Checker (www.2bone.com/links/linkchecker.shtml): This is another good option that is free.

check REL Link Checker Light (www.relsoftware.com/rlc/downloads): This is a free version of REL Software's commercial Web Link Validator, and it's good enough for smaller hobby, personal, or modest business sites.

check Xenu Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html): This is another free package you can try.

tip_4c.epsIf a URL points to one page that simply points to another (a pointer), you can’t leave that link alone. Sure, it works, but for how long? And how annoying! Therefore, if your link-checking expedition shows a pointer that merely points to another pointer (yikes), do your users a favor by updating the URL to point directly to the real location. You save users time, reduce Internet traffic, and earn good cyberkarma.

When Old Links Must Linger

If you must leave a URL active after it becomes outdated to give your users time to bookmark your new location, instruct browsers to jump straight from the old page to the new by including the following HTML command inside the old doc's <head>:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0"; url="newurlhere">

This nifty line of code tells a browser that it should refresh the page. The delay before switching to the new page is specified by the value of the content attribute, and the destination URL is determined by the value of the url attribute. If you build such a page, also include a plain-vanilla link in its <body> section, so users with older browsers can follow that link manually instead of automatically. You might also want to add text that tells visitors to update their bookmarks with the new URL. Getting there may not be half the fun, but it's the whole objective.

Make Your Content Mirror Your World

When it comes to content, the best way to keep things fresh is to keep up with the world in which your site resides. When things change, disappear, or pop up in that world, similar events should occur on your website. Because something new is always happening, be sure to provide visitors a reason to keep coming back. What’s more, if you can accurately and honestly reflect (and reflect upon) what’s happening in your world of interest, you’ll grab loyalty, respect, and continued patronage.

Look for Trouble in All the Right Places

There’s an ongoing need for quality control in any kind of public content, but that need is particularly acute on the web, where the whole world can stop by (and where success often follows the numbers of those who drop in and return). You must check your work while you’re building the site and then continue to check your work over time. This practice forces you to revisit your material with new and shifting perspectives and to evaluate what’s new and what’s changed in the world around you. That’s why testing and checking are never really over; they just come and go — preferably, on a regular schedule!

You and a limited group of handpicked users should thoroughly test your site before you share it with the rest of the world — and more than once. This process is called beta testing, and it’s a bona fide, five-star must for a well-built website, especially if it’s for business use. When the time comes to beta-test your site, bring in as rowdy and ornery a crowd as you can find. If you have picky customers (or colleagues who are pushy, opinionated, or argumentative), you might have found them a higher calling: Such people make ideal beta testers — that is, if you can get them to cooperate.

tip_4c.epsDon’t wait until the very last minute to test your website. Sometimes the glitches found during the beta-test phase can take weeks to fix. Take heed: Test early and test often; you’ll thank us in the end.

Beta testers will use your pages in ways you never imagined possible. They interpret your content to mean things you never intended in a million years. They drive you crazy and crawl all over your cherished beliefs and principles. These colleagues also find gotchas, big and small, that you never knew existed. They catch typos that spell checkers couldn’t. They tell you things you left out and things that you should have omitted. They give you a fresh perspective on your web pages, and they help you see them from extreme points of view. And they do all this before your users do! Trust us, that’s a blessing — even if it’s in disguise.

remember_4c.epsThe results of all this suffering, believe it or not, are positive. Your pages will be clearer, more direct, and more correct than they would have been had you tested them by yourself. (If you don’t believe us, of course, you could try skipping this step. And when real users start banging on your site, forgive us if we don’t watch.)

Cover All the Bases with Peer Reviews

If you’re creating a simple home page or a collection of facts and figures about your private obsession, this tip may not apply to you. Feel free to read it anyway — it just might come in handy down the road.

If your pages express views and content that represent an organization, chances are about 100 percent that you should run your pages through peer-and-management review before publishing them to the world. In fact, we recommend that you build reviews into each step along the way as you build your site — starting by getting knowledgeable feedback on such basic aspects as the overall design, writing copy for each page, and the final assembly of your pages into a functioning site. These reviews help you avoid potential stumbling blocks, such as unintentional off-color humor or unintended political statements. If you have any doubts about copyright matters, references, logo usage, or other important details, bring the legal department in. (If you don’t have one, you may want to consider a little consulting help for this purpose. Paying to avoid legal trouble beforehand is always cheaper than paying to get out of such trouble after the fact.)

tip_4c.epsBuilding a sign-off process into reviews so you can prove that responsible parties reviewed and approved your materials is a good idea. We hope you don’t have to be that formal about publishing your web pages, but it’s far, far better to be safe than sorry. (This process might best be called covering your bases, or perhaps it’s really covering something else? You decide.)

Use the Best Tools of the Testing Trade

When you grind through your completed web pages, checking your links and your HTML, remember that automated help is available. If you visit the W3C validator at http://validator.w3.org, you'll be well on your way to finding computerized assistance to make your HTML pure as air, clean as the driven snow, and standards-compliant as, ah, really well-written HTML. (Do we know how to mix a metaphor, or what?)

Likewise, using link checkers covered earlier in the chapter is smart; run them regularly to check links on your pages. These faithful servants tell you if something isn’t current, and they tell you where to find links that need fixing.

Schedule Site Reviews

Every time you change or update your site, you should test its functionality, run a spell check, perform a beta test, and otherwise jump through important hoops to put your best foot forward online. But sometimes you’ll make just a small change — a new phone number or address, a single product listing, a change of name or title — and you won’t go through the whole formal testing process.

That’s perfectly understandable — but one thing inevitably leads to another, and so on. Plus, if you solicit feedback, chances are good that you’ll learn something that points out a problem you’d never noticed or considered before. Schedule periodic site reviews, even if you’ve made no big changes or updates since the last review. Information grows stale, things change, and tiny errors have a way of creeping in as one small change succeeds another.

If there’s any code on your site (JavaScript, Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, or whatever), you’ll want to give it a thorough workout and inspection, too. A pool-shooting buddy of ours who works in quality control for a major technology company was recently assigned to review a website built to provide real-time security and error information to developers who use its products. He told us that it was obvious the developers didn’t try everything, in every possible combination, at the same time. When he did so, he broke things they didn’t know could be broken. Better to do this yourself (or hire somebody to do it for you) and fix it in advance rather than pay the price of public humiliation.

Just as you take your car in for an oil change or replace your air-conditioning filter, plan to check your website regularly. Most big organizations we talk to do this every three months or so; some do it more often. Although you might think you have no bugs to catch, errors to fix, or outdated information to refresh, you’ll often be surprised by what a review turns up. Make this part of your routine, and your surprises will be less painful — and require less work to remedy!

Foster User Feedback

Who better to tell you what works and what doesn’t than those who use (and hopefully, depend on) your site? Who better to say what’s not needed and what’s missing? But if you want user feedback to foster site growth and evolution, you must not only ask for it, you have to encourage it to flow freely and honestly in your direction. Then you need to act on that feedback to keep those wellsprings working.

Even after you publish your site, testing never ends. (Are you having flashbacks to high school or college yet? We sure are.) You may not think of user feedback as a form (or consequence) of testing, but it represents the best reality check your web pages are ever likely to get, which is why doing everything you can — including offering prizes or other tangibles — to get users to fill out HTML forms on your website is a good idea.

This reality check is also why reading all feedback you get is a must. Go out and solicit as much feedback as you can handle. Carefully consider all feedback that you read and implement the ideas that can improve your web offerings. Oh, and it’s a really good idea to respond to feedback with personal e-mail to make sure your users know you’re reading what they’re saying. If you don’t have time to do that, make some.

remember_4c.epsThe most finicky and picky of users can be an incredible asset: Who better to pick over your newest pages and to point out the small, subtle flaws they so revel in finding? Your users can develop a real stake in boosting your site’s success, too. Working with users gets them more involved and helps guide the content of your web pages. Who could ask for more? Put it this way: You may yet find out, and it could be very helpful.

If You Give to Them, They’ll Give to You!

Sometimes, simply asking for feedback or providing surveys for users to fill out doesn’t produce the results you want — either in quality or in volume. Remember the days when you’d occasionally get a dollar bill in the mail to encourage you to fill out a form? It’s hard to deliver cold, hard cash via the Internet, but a little creativity on your part should make it easy for you to offer your users something of value in exchange for their time and input. It could be an extra month on a subscription, discounts on products or services, or some kind of freebie by mail. (Maybe you can finally unload those stuffed Gila monsters you bought for that trade show last year.)

remember_4c.epsThere’s another way you can give back to your users that might not cost you too much. An offer to send participants the results of your survey, or to otherwise share what you learn, may be all the incentive participants need to take the time to give you feedback or answer questions. Just remember that you’re asking your users to give of their time and energy, so it’s only polite to offer something in return.