Silktide

[Stecyk]

I found this link http://www.silktide.com/index.php on my favorite blog J-Walk (http://j-walkblog.com/). Silktide provides a free online report of your website. When I ran my site through its engine, it gave high marks for delivering webpages quickly. Anyway, for those interested, you might wish to submit your site to Silktide.

Best regards,
Kevin

[Andilinks]

Thanks for this Kevin. They found redirects that they didn't understand and informed me that my site is illegal in Britain, but otherwise is excellent.

Andi

[Stecyk]

Andi, yeah, mine is illegal too.

[Wassercrats]

I only got a 6.3. In school, 65 was passing, so I guess I failed. And I got a poor for Britain too.Marketing How well marketed, and popular the website is. 4.8
Design How well designed and built the website is. 8.4
Accessibility How accessible the website is, particularly to those with disabilities. 6.5
Experience How satisfying the website is likely to be. 8.2
Visitor rating Average user rating for this site's design
Warning This website cannot be voted for technical reasons. No votes
Overall Summary score for this website. 6.3I have to look into this:Refresh redirects

We found your homepage attempted to redirect us to another page. Visitors and search engines are not fond of redirections for a number of reasons. Redirections stop the back button from working, which frustrates users, and create an annoying clicking sound in Internet Explorer. Most search engines will penalise or ignore websites using redirections.

Recommendations: We suggest you remove redirection from your website. If you are using it to perform browser tests, be aware that this is considered bad practice and compromises the accessibility and compatability of your website in particular.All I have in htaccess that redirects my homepage is:RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^polisource.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.polisource.com/$1 [R=301,L]But the URL I gave Silktide had the www, so there shouldn't be a redirect. I guess I have to see what status code I get from www.polisource.com to see if Silktide is right.

[Wassercrats]

This (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/blog/234?from=10) blog says that the "How well designed and built the website is" rating for www.spreadfirefox.com is 8.8. Spreadfirefox.com has the same problem with the huge space in the middle as the blog, in IE. You need a human to judge that.

[Andilinks]

I also use that code for my home page. There is another one that changes domain.com/index.htm to domain.com/ because these are duplicates in the Google index. With the code index.com disappears from the index.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.htm$ /$1 [R=301,L]

I just learned of this at WMW.

Andi

[bobba]

Hey,

This is a nifty tool, I looked at 2 of my sites the first www.helpfinding.co.uk which is quite old had a rating of 7.3 and mainly fell down because of disability issues

The second site www.you-say.com only got a 5.8 but it is quite a new site.

The thing I like most about this is that everything they suggested I could agree with in one way or another.

This brings me to a grip about google analytics and adsense.
Why arnt they compliant with disability and css, xhtml validation etc. Ive been checking my sites and if you look at this page (http://www.you-say.com/mobile-phones-cheaper-deals-281.html) and do a validate on it, everythings good except for all the google analytics and adsense.
(I know my site isnt perfect with validation but you know what I mean)

It's the same with affiliate codes as well.
Sorry Im going off topic but it's winding me up!

[Wassercrats]

I also use that code for my home page. There is another one that changes domain.com/index.htm to domain.com/ because these are duplicates in the Google index. With the code index.com disappears from the index.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.htm$ /$1 [R=301,L]

I just learned of this at WMW.

AndiI decided to do that, but I want to learn more about exactly what that does. Maybe I'll visit WMW and ask. For example, if [A-Z](3,9) means that it won't match domains with hyphens or with over 9 characters, then I might want to adjust that expression just in case I need it for another website.

[Wassercrats]

I confirmed that I submitted the www version of the URL, and the status code isn't a redirect for that URL. Silktide must have omitted the www. And I just realized that "Design makes proper use of modern technology (no table-based layout)" is wrong. My homepage is one big table and shouldn't be. I'm also not happy with the other 3 pages it chose to analyze. Those aren't my featured pages.

[esw]

Other than going to school for Cascading Style Sheets is there a quick-fix to the British Disability Discrimination Act (BDDA) issues? I've been seeing more traffic from .uk sites to a site of mine that just failed BDDA compliance and wouldn't necessarily want to lose that traffic. Hiring someone else isn't realistic at this point as it's just a tiny little site that doesn't have grand aspirations. I once had some voice stuff in my style sheets, but I had lifted the code straight from W3C's CSS area and <ahem> it failed to pass the W3C CSS validator. I don't really understand the voice stuff and, further, that's not what's failing the BDDA requirements. Most of the errors are similar to:

"Line 59, column 10: ID "NAVCONTAINER" already defined"
and
"Line 76, column 11: ID "ACTIVE" already defined".

I think this may have to do with the way I've nested things in my site. Anyone else seeing these kinds of errors reported?

Not that I've anything to fear for being in violation of the BDDA--I failed in marketing, too--but someday (someday when I've gotten my act together enough to dump the day job and really focus on publishing/mastering) it may make a difference.

[Andilinks]

...wouldn't necessarily want to lose that traffic.
Unless these are UK government sites or disability advocate sites I doubt your traffic would be affected, nor will there be any other consequenses beyond your own conscience for making life difficult for impaired web surfers.

I get a lot of traffic from a site in the UK and I doubt this link is in jeopardy from non-compliance.

But here are a lot of links for accessibility sites:

http://www.andilinks.com/design.htm#ac

edit: this one is specifically UK:

http://www.techdis.ac.uk/

Andi

[Wassercrats]

Most of the errors are similar to:

"Line 59, column 10: ID "NAVCONTAINER" already defined"
and
"Line 76, column 11: ID "ACTIVE" already defined".

I think this may have to do with the way I've nested things in my site. Anyone else seeing these kinds of errors reported?I've gotten those errors when building a new webpage based on a template, before I had a chance to fill in unique IDs. Just used class as a style selector. You can have duplicate class values, but keep the IDs unique.

[esw]

Thank you!

So, being the lazy person that I am I decided that before finishing reading anything at http://www.techdis.ac.uk/ I would peak at the source. I've never seen anyone use <br />. Guess it's back to school for me!

[Wassercrats]

<br /> is XHTML. It's the same as <br>. Don't worry about that. Even I don't.

[esw]

I've gotten those errors when building a new webpage based on a template, before I had a chance to fill in unique IDs. Just used class as a style selector. You can have duplicate class values, but keep the IDs unique.

Well, it does look like that. I seem to have some accessiblity confusion going on with my
<div id="navcontainer">
<ul id="navcontainer">
mess. I'll get that sorted out eventually.

As for the <br />, I thought br was obsolete so I dumped it from my vocabulary. I've gone to great lengths (okay, not really, but I have expended some small amount of effort) to find ways to get the same effect as br without actually using br.

Thanks!

[Wassercrats]

A line break is a fundamental way of clarifying things and isn't deprecated. I double checked with http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-BR to make sure. If it was considered style, more then one <br> in a row would probably be allowed.

[bobba]

The <BR> has now been updated with XHTML, just change it for <br/> you can do this with find and replace. In XHTML you have to close all your tags even <img src"whatever.gif" />
XHTML,CSS and DDA are all pretty much the same i.e. if you have good XHTML and CSS you'll be nearly DDA compliant, another bonus is that its great for SEO

Another tip when coding from HTML to XHTML is to use lowercase tags DDA dosent like uppercase tags (this took me ages to suss out!)

cheers
Bobba

[Andilinks]

The future has arrived, where are the flying cars? Well, there is AJAX...

When I first began learning HTML in 2001 the last chapter of the book I was using was titled "The Future: XML" and most of the current XHTML standards were explained there. It's good to know we're not standing still... :)

Andi