Joseph Hauckes from the Working at Home on the Internet blog has asked me to review his other site, the Working at Home on the Internet Web Page. I've been reading his blog since the beginning, and it's become one of the few blogs I read daily. He posts very regularly every day (he's only missed one day in the past six months), and it's a pleasure to watch his story evolve over time. I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Usability

The website is a collection of resources and advice for people starting their own Internet-based businesses. At first, the site looks like a blog. It takes some time to find the resources pages including Scams, Forums and Blogging Services. The links to these pages blend in to the side of the site. The site could use some clear navigation, ideally at the top of the page. This would help make the site easier to use and explore.

Design

The design is nothing spectacular, but it doesn't distract from the content either. On the homepage, the left navigation takes up most of my screen, and I have to scroll to the right to read the content. The rest of the pages don't have this problem, but it's the first impression that counts.

Web Technologies

This site was designed and built using Microsoft Frontpage. As a result, the HTML doesn't come close to validating. There's scattered inline CSS and even font tags. It's just not easy to produce valid code with WYSIWYG tools without being strong in HTML and CSS. I hear Microsoft's new HTML editor Expression is supposed to help with this.

Summary

The most important thing about any website is its content. However, it's important to make sure this information is easy to find. Joe's site may not win design awards, but it has a number of great articles to help people getting started with their own sites, and that's what counts.

I'm going to start doing the occasional Website Review. Consider yourself warned. I figure it's worth taking a look at the good and bad parts of other sites so we can all learn from their successes and mistakes.

I'll mostly be focusing on design and usability, usage of web technologies (ie. HTML, JavaScript and CSS) and whatever else strikes me as interesting and unique.

If you have a site you'd like me to review, let me know.

I didn't want to put my email address on the site, purely for spam reasons. I thought I could avoid spam by putting a contact form on the site instead. Now, I get more spam than I used to from comment spam bots using my contact form!

There is no escape, and I will have to accept this as a part of my destiny...

The golden rule of URLs: They never change.

This certainly isn't a new topic. In fact, it's as old as the web itself. It seems like it's been long forgotten, brushed off and ignored. It is still highly relevant and can't be stressed enough.

When designing URLs, assume they will be still be used 1000 years from now. Why? People already assume they won't change. They bookmark the page, search engines index the page, other sites link to the page. It's your responsibility to keep the page there.

Web applications, search engines, online shopping and sadly even simple web sites have designed URLs to be disposable, full of variables including session IDs and other junk. How often have you sent or received a URL that didn't work because the "session has timed out" or some other reason?

You can improve the permanence of a URL by making it as simple as possible. Try not to include a file extension (.html, .php, etc.) Try to split things up into a logical hierarchy. Using dates in the URL like /2006/3/ can help a site grow over time, but so can using a unique ID such as a number or title.

Sometimes URLs just have to change. Perhaps the original URL was one of those temporary, junk-filled ones and you are migrating to a permanent URL system. When this happens, make sure you put something in place to send the visitor to the new location.

There is already a great document written on this topic, so rather than repeat everything, I will include it here. I highly suggest you read it if you haven't yet:

W3C: Cool URIs don't change

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Flash. My girlfriend wants to set up a web site. She wants it to act like a lot of her favourite web sites: Flash sites. At first, I wanted to explain to her why this is such an awful idea.. but I couldn't. I couldn't because I realised a Flash web site can be perfectly accessible if done properly.

Then, I saw the video player from YouTube and realised, it's perfect. It's perfect because users don't have to choose from Windows Media Player, Quicktime or Real. They just need Flash (and everybody has Flash). This made me rethink what Flash really offers. Here is a single plugin that opens up Video and Audio capabilities, even streaming and bi-directional. This alone is reason enough to welcome Flash with open arms.

If we use Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO), or some other JavaScript-based Flash deployment method, nobody can complain. We can deliver alternative content for those without Flash, the disabled and search engine spiders.

• Decorative Flash can simply be replaced with an image
• Flash navigation can be replaced with a list of links
• For a whole Flash web site, we can replace it with the text, links and images in the Flash movie. It's better to split up a Flash site into pages anyway, or the swf file will get much too big.
• For sound and video, we can possibly use a transcript, or links to the raw mp3 or avi files. Though, sometimes, it's just not possible to replace video. We can only try our best.

Flash can be a wonderful, powerful tool when used properly. It's important to treat flash the same way we do images. They can improve the experience for many of our visitors. For all others, including search engines and those with disabilities, we need to make an alternative available.