myherefordshire.com page

this page is designed to give you some useful information and guidance related to websites. It will give you ideas for creating and maintining your own website and an insight into how myherefordshire.com works.

website etiquette

there are many books, articles and journals written about creating good and useable websites. We cannot tell you all you need to know in one page, but we can give you some good points you may wish to bear in mind when creating your web content. There is a vast amount of worldwide research on what users want to get from a properly designed and well thought out website but basically it can be summed up in 5 simple points;

• text they can read; 
• content that answers their questions; 
• navigation and search that help them find what they want; 
• short and simple forms such as simple registration and easy checkout; and 
• no bugs, typos, broken links and no out-of-date content.

from a visitor's point of view, a good web site is one that….

• is usable; 
• has something they want;
• doesn't waste their time; and 
• isn't irritating.

simple design rules to follow

there are some simple rules you can try and implement when creating your website. These will help both visitors to your site, other webpages and also search engines to access your site correctly and successfully.

1. ensure your site has proper metadata. This will aid search engines and ensure your pages appear correctly when a user performs a search. In other words ensure every page has a title, some keywords and a page description as a minimum, for example;
   <title>events</title>
   <meta name="description" content="This is a short description of my website" />
   <meta name="keywords" content="this, is, a, comma, separated, list, of, relevant, words" />
2. try and avoid the use of frames - search engines cannot successfully read frame-based sites. If you cannot avoid using frames, then ensure you have a static non-framed version of every page.
3. avoid the use of pop-up windows as many people disable them in browsers. If you have to use pop-up windows ensure users have a way to navigate back to where they have come from, or to the previous page, such as a breadcrumb trail or back/previous links.
4. try to avoid opening content in new browser windows. If this is not possible then ensure you inform the user a new window is about to be opened using the alt or title tags for images or links.
5. ensure your headers and text formatting is correct. Some of the most frequent errors on websites are mis-typed or broken html. Ensure every opening formatting tag, such as <b> for bold, is then closed after the text to be formatted, ie. </b>. Also, if you are using them, ensure your headers are in the correct order ie. H1 then H2 then H3, and you should not have multiple header 1s on a page.
6. avoid small font sizes, and/or low contrast colours. People use a multitude of screen sizes, browser versions and assistive software. Where possible avoid forcing font sizes, so people can use the built in browser text resizing tool, and avoid low contrasting colours to assist people with impaired eyesight.
7. try and design your site around 800x600 pixels and if possible avoid making the user need the horizontal scroll bar
8. give every image on your website some alternative text - so users with assistive technology can understand your site. For example; <img src="images/logo.gif" alt="my company logo" width="188" height="56" />
9. use colour to distinguish visited and unvisited links to help the user navigate around your site.
10. there are three basic features that all navigation designs should support. "Where have you been?", "Where am I?" and "Where can I go?"

myherefordshire.com search technology

myherefordshire.com is based upon a powerful crawler search technology engine. It works in a similar way to Google or MSN search in that it has three major elements.

1. first is the spider, also known as the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what is meant when we talk about a site being 'spidered' or 'crawled'. The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, which could be every day, week or month, to look for changes.
2. everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index is like a huge book, containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information. Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index, as the new pages have to be compared to the existing pages and discarded or overwritten. This means it is possible a web page may have been 'spidered' but not yet 'indexed'. Until it is indexed it is not available to those searching with the search engine.
3. search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sits behind myherefordshire.com and sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. For example, on myherefordshire.com, when someone searches for the word 'market' the search engine looks through every page in the index and returns all events, photos, and general web pages that contain a reference to the word 'market'.