Tip: Before you submit a site for review here do this..

Check your site at http://www.sitereportcard.com and keep tweaking until you get 'perfect' on all checks.

Check your site at http://validator.w3.org and don't stop tweaking until your site validates. Flash insertion probably exempt(?).

Check your site on http://www.instantposition.com for the first 5 of your keywords.

Check your site on http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp

Survive these and the world is your mollusc, if your site looks good too.

By following these tips (and others?) you will focus your reviews on the appearance of your website instead of the objective problems.

There maybe site checks I've missed but surely they will be listed below.

Good Luck.

what an excellent post! it will be very helpful to those asking for reviews.. because sometimes it;s not that easy to see all the problems a site has.

Great suggestion...

__________________
Mary Ann
Affordable Websites Designed - www.m-goret.com

Bootboy , this advice was too valuable to let slip through the boards.

For all those requesting a Site Review, this is an excellent course of action to take!

If you have any questions about any of the problems you might encounter, ask in the appropriate forums:

Validation & Design - Site Design

Accessibility - Accessibility & Usability

Optimising your site for Search Engines - Search Engine Discussion

Better websites makes for a more enjoyable Internet experience! :-)

__________________
Web Development Community ::: Forum ::: Library

It' time for Progressive Web & IT Development!

Bootboy and everyone else, I deny using Bobby, since his reports are not 100% valid.

For example when using empty or null alt tags, e.g alt="" or alt=" " with non-meaning images, as blind or spacer gifs, you do not pass priority 1 of the W3C/WAI WCAG 1.0, even if you really do.

More: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/....html#adef-alt

Try CynthiaSays. That is an accessibility validator I can trust.

For Mark-Up and more, see here: http://www.webnauts.net/check.html

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

This is really great , this Bobby site I am hearing for first time, I will have to go through it to comment on it.

Thanks for great post.

Bootboy, thank you so much for posting those sites. Wonderful useful information.

Ceallach

Wish I had read this Topic before I put my site up for review, thanks for the links to test the site very useful.

__________________
SteveF
Projectors

Hello all ya !

I have been looking into the websites you should visit before submitting a website for reviewing and discovered that all websites I have learned to love and like since I joined the www-community don't pass any of these tests with 'perfect' as a result. So why is it so important to pass all these tests ?

Even the http://www.sitereportcard.com website that is mentioned as a site you should visit before submitting will not pass the tests....

I am very curious !
Thanks,

kcire, your observations are very pertinent and your question valid.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and others, have, over the years, developed various languages/technologies with the aim of creating compatibility amongst the dozens, if not hundreds, of browsers in use. Without the rules the internet would become too chaotic and an inevitable exclusivity would develop. How many times have you seen 'Best viewed in IE5+ at 800x600'? What about blind people with text browsers or Netscape users?

As with national languages, if you want to be interpreted correctly by most it's a good idea to speak or write clearly. Unlike spoken or written languages which are full of variations and subtle nuances, the languages of the web are interpreted by unintelligent machines! Whilst the browser writers have developed ways around errors like missing end tags or quotation marks, errors at best slow down load time or at worst turn pages into dog's dinners! The browsers appear finally to have agreed a level of compliance, for everyone's benefit. As web designers we should celebrate this because it frees up our time to focus on the most important issue which is the content, layout and functionability of the sites we build.

You are right about http://www.sitereportcard.com/ and the warnings it generates. Also check http://www.google.com and my favourite sites like http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and http://www.guardian.co.uk/. Even the best designers get it wrong sometimes but that's no reason to not bother ourselves. Either they'll get it right or the <DOCTYPE> will be adapted to accommodate worthwhile developments.

Those working on the biggest sites don't need to worry too much about search engine placement but poorly put together sites do less well in the search engines for good reason. Chances are the content is suspect too. Would you buy a computer from a website that pops up error messages? Would you credit a scientific theory if it was peppered with spelling errors? Probably not, so Google et al will probably bury them deep. OK, so you don't have to get 'perfect' on all of the tests, sometimes it's impossible but you can still have a good go at it.

I haven't been visiting this forum for very long but I noticed a lot of sites submitted for review contained sloppy errors and typos. So I posted some useful links that I use myself (these days!) because I reckoned most people submitting sites actually wanted constructive observations about their layout and navigation, speed to load and usability. The validation, accessibility, spell-checking and search engine readiness tests are objective and are best dealt with by unintelligent machines!

I hope this answers your question.

Thank you for the above site analyzers.

Perhaps we could alter the statement from:
“Check your site at http://www.sitereportcard.com and keep tweaking until you get 'perfect' on all checks.”

To
“Check your site at http://www.sitereportcard.com and keep tweaking until you fix as much as you can.”

__________________
Presentation Rentals

Could I suggest that before submitting any sites for review people should also check each page of their site on http://www.copyscape.com/index.php - I realise it may be a little time consuming with large sites, but it will quickly pick up whether the 'inspiration' you get from other sites has crossed the line in to 'plagiarism'.
It would be more sensible to take the time to find out for yourself than risk an irate webmaster asking Google and Yahoo to delist you for copyright violation.

Bootboy great advise and tips for me as a newbie. I have tweaked my site in www.instantposition.com for keywords, and think it is as far as I can get it? It scores high on first 10 pages. The site validator I honestly dont fully understand as I do not understand all the code.I put site up for review a few weeks back and would welcome more input from all the knowledgeble people who post here.Anyone that could scan my site for problems and give me some tips would be a god send right now .And I may even offer a pure bred puppy of choice from my site if someone can really help me learn a little more :) Keep up the great postings you guys really do help alot of us.:)

hello, i want to submit my site for review but per the rules i want to make sure that it passess all the checks when trying to validate the site at http://validator.w3.org and i get 302 error and on other sites i am not able to check its status. My site was listed in google but its not there any more. Its 1.5 year old but i have recently moved my site to a dedicated server. can you please let me know whats wrong so that i can validated it through and then submit it for review.

My site is http://www.pakfellows.com

Hey irfan12jan they're not rules, I'm only a visitor here! They're just useful links to help you clean-up basic errors before submitting for review. Please post a request for review regardless and I for one will take a look at it.

Hi There
I was going to submit my site for review and came across the sites for validation and thought I would run and amend my home page with the validation sites suggestions. Apart from not quite understanding some of the problems to fix them, the line number given does not correlate to my site i.e in DW for me to change my problems?

Also does validator.org cache your site, I had 81 problems so I added alt tags to about 35 small arrow images, re-submitted and I still get 81 problems??

Thanks for reading

Ian

Hi Ian,

I could only see 69 problems when I tried to validate your homepage (maybe you've just fixed some?). As far as I'm aware, the validator doesn't cache your site.. if you click on "Re-validate" after making changes to your site, the results should reflect your changes.
One or two things I noticed, if you replace the ampersand character (&) with a &amp; that will reduce your error count. Also, in your CSS and HTML, using a class for your "left-right" rather than an id will also help significantly. id is used to control a single occurrence of an element, whereas class can be used throughout your pages.

Hope that helps,

Paul

PS. the line numbers would correlate if you were using a text editor to edit your pages. Maybe DW is not counting lines held in a non-editable template area?

__________________
London Web Design Agency | London IT Support | IT Support - Mac & PC

Not sure why I kept getting the same results. I'm home now (phew my day is done!! I wish) and I have the same results as you now.

I'll crack on with the rest once I understand them all. haha

Thank you

Ian Hill

Thanks for listing those 'Tweak' Links. They were very helpful...

Have a Great Day,
Kristian Pulz

__________________
I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.
- Jonathan Winters

WOW! I just love this whole site! Where were you guys all my life! Such wonderful links and posts! Such wonderful helpful tools! I'm really enjoying my experience with you guys! WOW! Anyone can be a SUPER SEOzer here! You guys ROCK!

Thanks for this site! What a resource!

JB

The extra sites will help me improve the site, thank for that.

I also use the following :

Echo Echo Web Tools

Very usefull.

The URLs are very useful and it helps to improve my website. Thanks a lot.

OK now I am totally confused.
We checked our site as suggested and we got back such varied results, we not sure what to do...

at http://www.sitereportcard.com

- We used our domain t-zers.net, www.t-zers.net and http://t-zers.net and we had 1 listing on Google and AOL, 137 on MSN and a bunch on All the Web... then with our "actual" URL www.tzrz.safeshopper.com with the http:// and without and got back waaay different results - 2 Search Engine Inclusions on Google & AOL

Then we tried the Search Engine Saturation Results
with our "actual" URL www.tzrz.safeshopper.com , then with the http:// and without and had aver 3400 links on Google, 216 on HotBot, and 2080 on Alta Vista ?

Checked our site at http://validator.w3.org , it couldn't find the t-zers.net domain, and using the www.tzrz.safeshopper.com it listed a whole bunch of "Priority Accessibility Errors" (mostly around our headings and colored texts) ?

Which is why we have a bunch of text links before our picture links - because someone a looong time ago from this forum suggested the same problem...


Checked http://www.instantposition.com for the first 5 of our keywords with the "www" - ZERO, nada on what we "thought" were our main keywords - one generic term came up on Google - but waaay more came up with the http://tzrz.safeshopper.com ? (all over Alta Vista, Netscape & AOL???)

So now what? is it our website, our html or just which deviation of our URL we submit?

help?

I recently reviewed a site that broke all of the current rules for SEO and blatantly spammed in several ways.

I think it might be helpful to point out that using hidden layers or background coloured text to stuff pages with keywords and phrases or using unnatural text is considered SPAM by most, if not all, search engines and could lead to a site being blacklisted.

If you're not sure please check with http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/

Tim

Thank you for the great sites to check out.

Not sure what I think of the Bobby one though. There was a problem with what they called a "web beacon" (external image).
This image is part of the code for my Stat Counter which is a terrific service I am not required to purchase. http://www.statcounter.com. As a small business owner I rely on these types of aids.

I revised my site recently but I will do all the "tweaking" before I submit it for review.

Thanks everyone here for the great advice - makes it easier to wade through all the other suggestions out there.

Totally good stuff. I am a new webmaster and didn't even know this stuff existed. Thanks

Bret
www.blackwealthnow.com

Thank you so much for your post. I never knew that information was available.

Amy

There appears of late a number of trends in this forum which could be addressed and improve matters:

1) SPAM posts from members with only one post to their credit. Usually an affiliate sites that members take time to review, only to get no response or action from the site owner who never comes back.
Solution: make the threshold for posting a site review say 20 posts.

2) The guidelines for postings are ignored. In recent weeks there have been sites posted that ignore ever guideline anad have never been near are so abysmal that they threaten the reputation of these forum.
Solution: Re post the stickies and remove all the answers to then close the thread - there are even request for site checks and their answers in the stickies! And if the guidelines are ignored - delete the thread.

3) Revised sites on new threads. There are sites that have 2 or 3 or more threads being added to because no-one knows which is the latest version.
Solution: add to the rules, that revisions must be added to the original thread.

4) There are more and more banal reviews which do no-one any good. Like "Looks good to me" and "can't see anything wrong" when in reality the site stinks. Also comments like "I agree with the last post" and nothing more are a waste of the poster's time and our reading it.

__________________
Paul Bilton design services ~ Sites not Sights

Just so people know...the first post mentions flash as being exempted from validation...there's a workaround for it that is pretty easy to do that validates through alistapart.

Hope that helps!

Being very new to all this, I am astounded at the amount of free help available and the number of people willing to assist. Thank you so much!!

I am, at present, trying to fix some of the many errors in my site. (many I don't understand yet)
I will submit for review when I have finished.

Kerry

Great information.
html warnings and errors seems annoying. Some suggestions are useless.

As a complete newby here I thought I would see how the professionals format their pages - so I validated this page (the page you are reading now - http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=25029) using the below quoted (http://validator.w3.org) site and THIS page came up with no less than 36 errors on it.

The site http://www.sitereportcard.com/ comes up with Result: Failed validation, 53 errors

The site http://www.instantposition.com/ results with 5 validation errors

and the site http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp results in 6 validation errors

The only site that passed validation 100% was http://validator.w3.org/ who you would expect to. That said their site is absolutely mind nummingly boringly dead as far as making a page enjoyable to pass through.

Great advice, but are the people running these sites really interested in their own advice - there doesn't seem to be a correlation here between advice geiven and followed...? Now I'm going to be struggling to take it all seriously again...even though I know I should.

I will of course, but it does seem like I am going to be doing a load of stuff that many others are not bothering with.

Begining to feel there was a strong nuance behind the closing "Good luck" message.
---------------------------------------

It appears when i try to validate that the paragraph tag is no longer accepted? I had no idea, and it seems to work in every browser i have tested?

DaveG,

You are absolutely right about your observations of the sites you list. See also the 9th post (page 1) in this thread for some other sites that fail. The bottom line is that it's good practice to produce valid code and bad practice to not. It's also not true or inevitable that valid code equals boring pages, that's purely a design issue. I think a lot of the problem is to do with dependancy on WYSIWYG programs that are less strict when it comes to validating code than the specialist validators. I also suspect that some 'professionals' wouldn't even understand the error messages because they don't actually know HTML!

I agree it's frustrating to make an effort when you see others seemingly not bothering but ultimately it's their loss for being lazy or careless and your gain for getting it right. I would be fascinated to read what SiteReportCard, Instant Position, WebProWorld, the Guardian, the BBC and Google have to say about their non-validating pages. I think sometimes developers' well intentioned efforts to solve browser issues may be a cause. For instance, triggering Quirks mode (by not using DOCTYPE) to get around old-browser glitches with CSS or something else, creates non valid pages, even if the code is otherwise clean. Also, the traditional work-a-round for Flash insertion is not valid but it works. So we use Flash Satay because it does validate only to discover that that too has accessibility issues in Firefox! Sometimes it's a steep up-hill struggle.

I think the tide is turning though especially as reports of the SE's preferring valid pages fly around. Self interest can focus the mind wonderfully! It's also so easy to get it right these days, apart from the W3C validator I also use the 'Web Developer' and 'HTML Validator' (based on Tidy) Firefox extensions extensively.

Many of the common validation errors are accessibility issues, for instance ALT tags, so bear that in mind whenever you start feeling you can't be bothered. Other's interests can also focus the mind wonderfully!

Incidentaly, there was no nuance intended in my farewell comment, I meant it.

Good Luck! (there was then)

Frogmanandy,

Paragraph is valid. At least I hope it is! Please post the offending URL.

I did it the wrong way around but still found this useful.

__________________
Simply Clicks | SEO | SEO Training| Pay Per Click Advertising | Search Engine Powered Marketing

i have used http://validator.w3.org By complying it you also get one step ahead on the path of SEO.

Manish Ladha
www.mansoftcreations.com
Web Development | Web Promotion | Web Hosting

bootboy, great post. useful, very useful info! thnks a lot!

__________________
WwW.LookForLinks.Com

I got 8 out of 10 which I though was pretty good BUT some of the errors that came up seemed not to be relevant I thought.

It kept going on about closed <\scripts> not having an open <script> before them, when clearly they did, but on a different line.

Also it didn't like my menu bar built using Xara Webstyle 3 - but then thats how it is I suppose.

Good set of tools though.

tina....

simplye,

The most important of the HTML checkers is the one at W3C. For your first page W3C found 82 errors which is quite a lot but hardly surprising considering you used FrontPage 5.0 to put the site together.

If you don't know HTML I recommend that you use the free NVU (wysiwyg) program which has the feel of FrontPage but is so much better.

You have some very strange things going on in your code and you should try to correct them. There's a mishmash of doctypes, some HTML4 some XHTML. It looks like you've pasted code from other sites without realising the intrinsic differences. I haven't got time to go through it but I think NVU will help you to learn HTML which ultimately is the best way to produce clean code.

Good luck.

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Hi Tim,

many thanks for your comments, I will download the html editor and give it a go. I used Xara Webstyle 3 to create the menu for my site... do you think this was a problem !

I noticed on the check that it came up many times.

tina....

Tim, Your post and advice has been a great help! Thanks.

Brad
www.txcaglue.com

A few other quick ones.

1. Optimize your site to 800 x 600 (although 1024 x 768 is what the majority of people are moving towards).

2. Check that your content images are optimized for web viewing, whilst maintaining quality. Use Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc.

3. Check that your site maintains its appeal and usability on Mac, Linux/Unix and Windows based browers such as Opera, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari, etc.

__________________
Resources to help YOU succeed online
http://www.netcashcows.com

Thanks. I am certainly going to use some of this info in the near future.

I told my boss about this because he didn't even notice what's wrong with our site. We were all too busy looking for clients and cheking people and their performane offline. Little did we know that one source of low input was our site itself. We thought we did it all right.

Then after submitting these sites to my boss that was the start when we all realized the real problems.

Is everybody familiar with this? Hope they are...

Thanks guys.


epithet

Susannah, welcome at WPW forums.
But I don't understand what you want a review here, if you have a web guy. Send me please per PM your site URL, and see what I can do for your problem here.

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Susannah, welcome at WPW forums.

But I don't understand why do you want a site review here, if you already have a web guy who can fix your problems.

Please send me per PM your site URL, so I can see if I can solve your problem you have in our forums here. :)

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Edited by MOD (Greeneagle)

jax59 - welcome to WPW, but we just don't permit spamming up several threads with an affiliate link only. That doesn't meet our quality guidelines at WPW. Please reread your agreement before posting again.

Thanks,
Ken

could you review this please?

Sure. You're an idiot!

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

It awesome what you can find and learn on the net

It would be more awesome what we can learn and byy on the net, if you would also update your spammy signature, which make you and your services less credible to potential customers here at WPW.

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO