Noticíes

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 is garbage. We know. We used it for a great number of years and now it continues to curse our web developments. It is, for all purposes, broken. There is no fixing it. There are just doing little things in websites so that people who visit using IE6 don't see the thing completely blow up.
    So, it's with this that we started up something of a hobby project called, End 6!. It's pretty simple. There's a little chunk of JavaScript that someone can put on their site that triggers a window which gets in the user's face about the fact that they're using a browser that is bad. Then there is the hope that they'll click on one of the links provided to upgrade their browser and make the internet a more friendly place.
    This may sound like it's just something that we're doing to make our lives easier and that is part of it. But, we generally get paid by the hour, so why should we care if a job takes an hour longer to do because we have to fix IE6 bugs? Well, because it's just stupid waste. But, more importantly there is the fact that people using IE6 open up their computer to any number of vulnerabilities since Microsoft is not really putting any effort in to patching IE6, seeing as how it is obsolete.
    What's the solution? Besides running the End 6! code on a site of your own, upgrade to Explorer 7, Firefox, or Opera and stop being one of the 35-50% of users on this broken system.

Many people sometimes don't realize how much well-written code matters in respect to how a search engine will treat your site. Well, let us tell you that we've seen first hand the degree to which this is the case.
    A recent website that is a good case study for this is a personal one for a friend of ours. A screen shot of the original site code can be seen below. Make note of the use of 'font' tags and some of the rather odd 'meta' tags. The code is also lacking proper indentation and is of mixed alphabetic cases. It's not that he did anything completely bad when he made the site many years ago, it's just that it's based on old standards that aren't completely adhered to. The net result was that when you would search for him on Google, the site wouldn't appear anywhere in the results. Amazing, huh? Perhaps it was some other problem such as directory structure, no robots.txt file, or some random glitch? No, it wasn't. It was Google's (and Google alone as it showed up on Yahoo and MSN) refusal to index the site based on the what it thought of as less than perfect code.
    We worked over the same content for the site, cleaned up the structure, and it is now up at www.dinko.org. There is nothing amazing about the design and we built it to look like a typical site these days. If you happen to look at the code though, you will notice strict adherence to XHTML 1.0 Strict definitions. Everything is lowercase. The proper 'meta' tags are there as well as a whole slew of other things.
    So, what was the end result? Two weeks after putting the new version live, you could actually find it on Google. A month after putting the new version live, his site comes up as the number one result when you search for him. You can try to say that other factors were at work, but based on the results we saw, it emphasizes the fact that you need to watch your code to design a site properly.