Redesign

A little about the sites current upgrades.

As the site traffic has increased and I speak to other web developers I have noticed an increase in non-traditional browsers visiting the site. This began several months ago while beta testing some new css layouts. I noticed that as I re-developed the pages with relative sizes for tables and font sizes, traffic increased a little. As I tweeked the pages and continued to clean up the code to speed up the load times I also noticed another bonus, a big increase in search engine crawls and indexing which helped with rankings as well. The beta testing went better than expected and I was pleased with the results. At the time all of the sites pages were coded in html 4.01 transitional or loose, many did not validate but it didn't seem to matter much, or so I thought. as I began another development project I figured it was time to utilize xhtml strict. Now there were many reasons for the switch to xhtml but the one that stuck with me was cross browser compatability. As the other project developed that project a whole new aspect came to light, accessibility. I will expand on that at another time. But for now the basic fundamentals were to design for cross browser support and graceful degradation, (more browser friendly and give nicer results to mutiple screen widths). The best way to achieve this was to scrap the idea of utilizing tables for page content structure and developing tableless layouts with css. Again I launched a few beta pages, tried to break them with different tools and browsers and noticed a big change in search engine results! The more I developed the style with css coding the cleaner and smaller my pages were which tranlated to faster loading and better search engine results. What a bonus! But an even greater bonus was the increase in text based browsers and handheld devices too! Well that has led me to re-develop before the last redesign was completed but sure saved a lot of double work and a lot of headaches to boot.