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Businesses going green

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Going green has become a hot topic in our environmentally conscious society. More and more companies are making the effort to take a “green” approach to how they do business through a variety of methods, including recycling, conservation, environmentally-friendly construction and more. This kind of social consciousness appeals to potential customers and clients, which means it helps to spread the word about the purpose of going green and what strides have been taken by an individual organization.

How do you tell the world that your company has officially “gone green?” The best avenue is through your Website. Not only can you discuss the measures you have taken in detail, your site can also act as a resource, passing along valuable “green” links to visitors. The focus should be on your organization and the motives behind going green. This kind of forward thinking about the carbon footprint your company leaves on this planet will provide both potential and existing customers extra incentive for doing business with your company.

THAT Agency provides a great concept in their “green page” offering. Because THAT Agency understands and applauds the steps taken in any company’s agenda to go green, a Green Page can be designed to highlight those efforts and detail the ideology behind them. The Green Page will be a representation of your particular brand and will enforce your commitment to the environment and make a statement about your company’s belief in preserving it. Moreover, the Green Page will also display your commitment to the investment and conservation of the very employees at the heart of your operation. Therefore, if your company has employee-centered programs in place that not only place a focus on their efforts to go green, but also on the significance of their overall well-being and how that affects your company as a whole, a Green Page is a necessity for your company.

THAT Agency has a commitment in standing behind those companies that have made the choice to stand up for the environment. Each company that goes green deserves a Website that reflects their dedication for the world to see.

Google Digs Flash

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For years, Flash designers and developers have been shunned by the search engines and the SEO world because this technology was not ‘search engine friendly’. While Flash gurus were making the web a fun place by providing visual enhancements and improved user interaction, Google was ignoring their hard work because it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, index content hidden in Flash files. Well, times are changing as Google recently announced the launch of their new algorithm for indexing some Flash content.

In short, Google recently announced that they can now ‘see’ most text elements within flash files. Any content or links presented as text within your flash files should now be indexable. Additionally, Google has stated that they are now able to interact with flash by, “clicking buttons, entering input, and so on.” This means that Google will be able to access more pages on more websites that were using Flash for navigation.

Google still cannot ‘see’ images and video that don’t contain text elements. They also have stated that they continue to have trouble accessing certain types of JavaScript files.

What does this mean for the web?
From an SEO standpoint, we’ll probably see more competition in the search world as more content is indexed by Google. All that old content that was previously hidden in flash files may now be included in the search index for searchers to enjoy.

Also, as Google improves their ability to index Flash content we’ll see Flash implemented across the web. Once the SEO community becomes confident in Google’s ability to scan Flash files, they’ll likely start giving the green light for increased flash implementation.

Why Tableless Web Design

Posted by alek under Web News
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Tableless Web design is a method of web design and development without using HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page. CSS was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to improve web accessibility and to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational.

Advantages

Accessibility
Because of the rapid growth of the Internet, disability discrimination legislation, and the increasing use of mobile phones and PDAs, it is necessary for Web content to be made accessible to users operating a wide variety of devices. Tableless Web design considerably improves Web accessibility in this respect. Screen readers and braille devices have fewer problems with tableless designs because they follow a logical structure.

As a result of the separation of design (CSS) and structure (HTML), it is also possible to provide different layouts for different devices, e.g. handhelds, mobile phones, etc. It is also possible to specify a different style sheet for print, e.g. to hide or modify the appearance of advertisements or navigation elements that are irrelevant and a nuisance in the printable version of the page.

The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines’ guideline no. 3 states “use markup and style sheets and do so properly.”[1] The guideline’s checkpoint 3.3, a priority-2 checkpoint, says “use style sheets to control layout and presentation.”[2]

Bandwidth savings

In general, a tableless design results in smaller, more compact Web pages. Tableless designs do away with the need for embedded tables and spacer images and can significantly reduce download times, save bandwidth and reduce the latency of the site.

The CSS file can also be cached by the browser, thereby providing further savings in bandwidth, particularly for dynamically generated content as the layout information does not need to be reloaded with every page visit.

These issues are particularly important on busy and popular sites, and on content that will be viewed by users with slow Internet connections (e.g. on mobile devices.)

Maintainability

Maintaining a website may require frequent changes, both small and large, to the visual style of a website, depending on the purpose of the site. Under table-based layout, the layout is part of the HTML itself. As such, without the aid of template-based visual editors such as HTML editors, changing the positional layout of elements on a global scale may require a great deal of effort, depending on the amount of repetitive changes required. Even employing grep or similar global find & replace utilities cannot alleviate the problem entirely.

In tableless layout using CSS, virtually all of the layout information resides in one place: the CSS document. Because the layout information is centralized, these changes can be made quickly and globally by default. The HTML files themselves do not, usually, need to be adjusted when making layout changes. If they do, it is usually to add class-tags to specific markup elements or to change the grouping of various sections with respect to one another.

Also, because the layout information is stored externally to the HTML, it is quite easy to add new content in a tableless design, whether modifying an existing page or adding a new page. By contrast, without such a design, the layout for each page may require a more time-consuming manual changing of each instance or global find & replace utilities.

Lastly, if the HTML source code is to be edited by hand, the code is more visually readable without the table layout tags and other styling information.

Whats Ajax?

Posted by alek under Web News
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With all the hype about “Ajax web applications“, you could be forgiven for assuming Ajax is some radical new plugin, akin to Macromedia Flash. And you would therefore be under the impression that Ajax is out of bounds until you upgrade your “so last month” browser, or at least download the coveted “Ajax plugin”.

Good news: You can run Ajax right now. At least, assuming you have a web browser from the past few years - IE, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. Have you seen Google Maps or perhaps GMail? They’re both Ajax applications. So are Zuggest and the AjaxPatterns Wiki Demo.

What do they all have in common? All these applications take a great leap forth towards the richness of standard desktop applications. No longer are you forced to wait five seconds for the page to reload every time you click on something. Ajax applications change in real time. They can let you drag boxes around, they can refresh themselves with new information, they can completely re-arrange the page without clearing it. And there’s no special plugin required. Ajax is just a style of design, one that milks all the features of modern browsers to produce something that feels less web and more desktop.

Applications can act more like and be developed more like the days of Visual Basic, Delphi, PowerBuilder, C++ with GUI frameworks, etc. Thus, it is 90’s GUI features but with a web browser: it strives to meld the best of web and the best of desktop GUI’s. Web browser standards were originally designed for e-brochures only. Business forms and other needs were hacked into this e-brochure framework over time and it is clear that this after-thought retrofitting for different purposes has been ugly. Ajax attempts to remedy this.