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Web Site Masters: Best Practices

We think of best practices as the technologies and development methodologies to enable users to develop great, standards-compliant web applications quickly and efficiently. Working with best practices insures that your sites will enable users to push the envelope of the web, while rendering well all in browsers and reducing maintenance costs.

Firefox Browser

You may hear us refer to this browser as a tool for your website development. Indeed, it is revolutionary in the way it allows one to understand how CSS drives the look of your site. Download the browser and the extensions we recommend here. Your account manager can assist in explaining the ins and outs once you have it installed. Prepare to be empowered and take back the web.

Opening New Browser Windows

Users are easily confused when websites link them to non-Web documents that offer a significantly different user experience than that of browsing Web pages.

Because users frequently close document windows, the best guidelines for linking to non-Web documents are:

Open non-Web documents in a new browser window. Such as a .pdf. Try to let the user know what they will be opening before clicking. Labeling the link would be the best idea.
Warn users in advance that a new window will appear. See above.
Remove the browser chrome (such as the Back button) from the new window. (this would require a javascipt).
Best of all, prevent the browser from opening the document in the first place. Instead offer users the choice to save the file on their harddisk or to open it in its native application (Adobe Reader for PDF, PowerPoint for slides, etc.). See more...

Font Tag Removal Tool

If you've recently redesigned your website, you probably have some existing pages that do not adhere to your new CSS (style sheet) formatting. This happens because either you have copied and pasted from a program such as MSWord, WordPerfect or you have formatted the pages with the ICU tool, which is overwriting your new CSS properties.

In the past, this has taken users untold hours to remove the font attributes out of the code of each page so that the CSS could have dominance over page formatting.

To quickly remedy this issue, use our Font Tag Removal Tool to remove unwanted Font attributes that conflict with CSS properties.

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