Website Technical Information[2]

Purely for interest, this page explains a bit about the Impington Website, how many people visit it, how it was built, who hosts it, etc. If you want more information on this sort of thing you might like to check out howtobuildawebsite.blogspot.com.


Website Statistics - How are we doing?

One measure of a website's success is how many people visit it, or, how many 'hits' it gets. Advertisers often seek exposure on popular websites, which is how sites like www.google.com make money.

Certain summary statistics for the impington website are provided automatically by the web host company. Some information on how to interpret the summary statistics is available here - it seems to me that the 'Visits' figure is the best approximate measure of how many people have visited the site. If you want to have a look at a more detailed information about how the site is used, click on a month within the first table shown in the summary.

Other interesting website statistics are available from Marketleap tools:

  • www.marketleap.com/publinkpop - link popularity check is a tool to measure your website's overall web presence and visibility. It shows how many links (or "votes") that a search engine has found for your website. To use this type in your URL, for example, www.aquariusclub.net and if you like, other URLs you wish to compare it with, such as www.impingtonswimmingclub.org.uk, or www.4sarasota.com, type in the access code shown on screen (3 characters in strange text) and generate a report.

  • www.marketleap.com/siteindex - tool to find out how many pages each search engine has to your website in its index. To use this type in your URL, in this case for example, www.aquariusclub.net and if you like, other URLs you wish to compare it with, such as www.impingtonswimmingclub.org.uk, or www.4sarasota.com, type in the access code shown on screen (3 characters in strange text) and generate a report.

  • www.marketleap.com/verify - tool to verify whether a specific keyword will return your website on one of the first 3 results pages if it is searched for in the big search engines. To use this type in your URL, in this case www.impingtonswimmingclub.org.uk and then the keyword you want to verify, for example, 'cambridge swimming', type in the access code shown on screen (3 characters in strange text) and generate a report.

How did we buy the www.impingtonswimmingclub.org.uk website domain?

Many companies sell website names, called 'domains', over the internet. Ours was purchased for £20 for 2 years, through www.34sp.com, who also host the site. There is a facility on their website to check the availability of the site you want.


How is the website hosted on the Internet?

For £15 per year, www.34sp.com host our site, giving us 30Mb of webspace on their servers. As well as being reasonably priced, 34sp provide lots of user support and a professional web hosting service with many facilities which are not normally available with the cheaper hosting deals. As with most hosting deals, the only catch is that you need to pay more if you exceed the maximum 'bandwidth' you have been allocated. Bandwidth is used up every time someone visits the Impington site, so if thousands of people suddenly visited the site, we'd have to pay a little more to 34sp! On the upside, when you get thousands of hits, you can generally do a deal with a site host by offering them advertising on the site.


Why is the website so basic looking? Why are there not more funky graphics?

My day job is all about designing software for optimal usability. On the web, one way to achieve decent usability is to keep things very simple and dont go too mad with unnecessary funky graphics because they make web pages slower to load and often harder to figure out. Jakob Nielsen is one of the leading experts on web usability, so to get an idea about what informs some of the thinking behind the design of the Impington website, check out his website www.useit.com.


How did Google's Search find Impington Swimming Club?

There's quite a lot to say on the topic of search engines. To begin with, to get search engines to notice a webpage you can start by submitting it to them - but note, it can take weeks before they notice you. Lodging your site with directory listings like Yahoo is also a good idea (but we're still waiting for Yahoo to list Impington in its directory.


Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There is quite a lot more you can do to make sure your website comes out on top when someone uses a search engine like google. I found the following useful:


How was the website written? / How was the XHTML and CSS written?

The website was originally written in Notepad on an old Windows 95 computer writing the HTML by hand. If you look at a website in your browser (eg Internet Explorer) and you go to the edit menu and select 'View Source', you'll see the HTML code for the site you are looking at, normally presented in Notepad . Philip Greenspun's excellent guide to web publishing and his 21 minute guide to HTML is a great way to get started with writing simple, unfussy, HTML for a website.

These days, like Zeldman, I use Pagespinner on the Mac - though I'm less happy with it than Zeldman is because I don't like the keyboard handling very much. Mind you, I like some nifty features like 'Includes' which automatically date stamp each page with the last saved date.

Originally, much of the structure of the website layout is handled by putting all of the content into HTML tables. This is quite a simple and reliable approach to website layout, and is an approach still advocated by the RNIB.

A better way to layout a website instead of using tables would be to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to handle the layout. These can greatly simplify the HTML and make site maintenance much easier. So, that's what I tried next!


How did you ensure that the HTML would work across all browsers?

Truth is, I didn't. I got this wrong. I had thought that writing simple HTML would eliminate problems with browser compatibility. Unfortunately this was a little hopeful! Some modern browsers will overlook problems in website's HTML code which masks the fact that some older browsers are less forgiving. The only way to be sure about compatibility is to run a website through the W3C HTML Validator program to ensure everything is OK. I've now done that and more or less everything is ok now. So, people who couldn't see some of the pages properly should now see them all fine! I've now changed the Javascript (see point below about avoid spam email) so that it too is now perfectly valid (I got a lead on fixing this from htmlhelp.com).

We can now display a little logo to show that we comply with HTML standards...

Valid HTML 4.0!

Well, that wasn't really the end of the story. These days things have moved on so this website has been re-written in xhtml and uses a fluid Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layout. However, the importance of validation has not gone away, so in addition to using the W3C HTML Validator to check my xhtml, I now also now use the W3C CSS Validator to make sure the CSS is ok. So, the logos we can now display are...

Regardless of the logo, if you notice any of the webpages not displaying properly, let me know and I'll take a look.


How is the page layout handled in Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) now there are no tables?

There is a lot to say on this topic. For a start, why not compare the Old html 4, table based site design with the New xhtml, CSS based site layout (feel free to look at the main CSS layout file). I hope you'll agree that the xhtml, stripped of most formatting information is much easier to read than the previous turgid table based layout.

Cascading Style Sheets aim to separate content from layout and formatting. There are very many reasons to do this but one is to provide greater accessibility to a website for disabled people. Another reason is so that the web page can easily be viewed on a different device, like mobile phone - it's not tied to a web browser any more.


What is 'Universal Design'?

This website has been designed to be universally accessible. Most new buildings have a ramp, in addition to steps, to ensure they are universally accessible and nobody is needlessly excluded because of a disability. The same should be true of websites but instead of the ramp, various small design changes are needed to ensure universal access. Masters swimming is a popular sport amongst disabled athletes - so why shouldn't they be able to use our website like everyone else?

On this website you can:

  • increase the text font size you use to view the page
  • use access keys to navigate to key parts of the screen so you don't need the mouse
  • skip the navigation and go right to the content (if you are using a screen reading device)

It's worth noting that the majority of people registered blind (70% in the UK) use some remaining partial sight to view a web page - so ensuring font sizes can be increased is a very important consideration for helping blind people use the web.

You can find out much more about making your website accessible from a great website called www.diveintoaccessibility.org - of particular use are the explanations of how people with different disabilities use the web.


What are Access Keys?

Many disabled users, such as blind people, cannot use a mouse for accessing the web. So, websites are starting to offer shortcut keys called 'Access Keys' to make designs more universally usable.

The access keys selected for this site are based on those prescribed by the UK government for their websites - these are some of the most comprehensive standards available presently. These and other standards are discussed on Clagnut.

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

Pages on this site have the following access keys - often denoted within squared brackets throughout the site as a reminder, eg [1] shows that Alt+1 (PC) or Ctrl+1 (Mac) will take you 'Home'.

  • S - Skip navigation
  • 1 - Home
  • 2 - What's New
  • 4 - Search
  • 6 - Help (same meaning as '0' here )
  • 8 - Terms and Conditions
  • 9 - Feedback
  • 0 - Access Key Details

How can you check whether the website is truely accessible?

Firstly, you need to listen to what people using your site tell you - no matter what tests you have done it's easy to inadvertantly make a mistake which gives people difficulty getting to the information on your website. I was lucky enough to get some feedback from a local blind swimmer who had been using this site - I'm extremely grateful for that feedback as I learnt loads from it (though it took many more hours of messing around with CSS and fluid designs to get things right).

Secondly, there are various tests you can do to check that a website is reasonably accessible. So, as part of ensuring this website is accessible the code has not only been validated as as XHTML 1.0 Strict with valid CSS but the accessibility verified through the use of the Bobby tool and gained a 'AA' rating, as well as a regulation 508 rating. It is believed to also conform to WAI accessibility standards but there is currently no automated tool to test this.

If you're so clever, why only a AA accessibility rating? Why not AAA?

In order to get an AAA rating with the verification tools, it is necessary to enter a default text string into the search box. I think this is unnecessary and hampers usability rather than adding anything. So, I have not bothered with this and have accepted just a AA rating. Interestingly, if you look at the xhtml on the otherwise excellent www.diveintoaccessibility.org, you will see that Mark has cheated this part of the verification by adding an empty string " " into the 'value' property.

input type="text" size="18" name="search" id="search" value=" "

This contravenes the accessibility rule that the verification tools are checking for, which is the Bobby Regulation about default text...

Include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas - placeholder text appears in the form control before the user has made any changes. The user can type over that text when entering data into the form.

So, Mark has put in an empty string to cheat the verification tools in order to get an AAA rating. My view is that it would be better to accept the AA rating rather than get AAA by cheating the tools. There are always clever people out there who can cheat the tools - challanging the appropriateness of this accessibility guideline in the first place would seem to make more sense.


How does the website avoid getting spam sent to the email addresses shown?

Automatic programs running on the internet are on the lookout for email addresses posted on websites. When they find them they add them to huge databases of junk mail receipients. Such junk email is called spam and it's quite hard to avoid receiving spam. On this site, all email addresses shown are constructed using javascript, rather than just written straight into the page's HTML code. This javascript aims to defeat automatic programs in their email address harvesting activities. It is unlikely to be 100% successful in avoiding spam but it'll probably work ok. If you want to know more about how to do this on your own site, check out The Java Source, where it came from.

Some people, normally very techie people, switch off javascript in their web browsers. These people would not see any contact email addresses on this website if they are only available through javascript. So, a <noscript> tag is used to reveal addresses in a different format to those people with javascript switched off. If you want to know more about how to do this, select 'View'->'Source' in your Browser and check out this page's html (the bit at the bottom!).