Center Your Pages – Pages that are left or right aligned don’t work well with larger PC monitors, and often look out of place due to the large amount of space left to one side.

Use Ample White Space – Resist loading up your pages with everything imaginable. Focus is important. Use white space to guide visitors as they navigate your site. Clutter simply invites confusion.

Consistency – This reverts back to short term versus long term memory retention and branding principles. Try to use the same terminology in your prompts and menus.

KISS – We’ve all see the term. Keeping it simple works. Highlight the key products or services you offer on your home page, then provide more in-depth information about them deeper in your site. Don’t try to squeeze everything onto one page that scrolls forever.

Embrace all five senses – reach out to your visitors in a way that they’ll best understand what you have to offer. Use a mix of graphics and short blocks of text to capture their attention.

Employ analytics – to determine how visitors reach your site, how long they stay & if they return. If your site has a high bounce rate, perhaps the search query doesn’t match well with your content, or the content may need to be revamped.

Enhance Credibility and Trust – Add an About Us page. In a era where we’re being warned to avoid certain websites, as they may infect your computer with all sorts of malware, it’s important to convey credibility at first glance. Let’s face it – the design of your site directly relates to the perception of your professionalism.

Color and Layout – speaks volumes about your business. Color themes are perceived differently in global markets, so it’s vitally important to understand your target audience. What works for car dealerships doesn’t necessarily work for furniture retailers. Research your competition – emulate success.

Online Store? Increase your conversions with options, discount codes and freebies. I know if I’m comparing products and one vendor offers an immediate rebate, I’ll opt for that every day over the option to mail in some coupon and wait for weeks to get a check back.

Updated Dec 27 2011

Web design is about perception (by the visitor) - so user-centric designs lead to more successful & profitable websites. The key here is to approach your design from your visitor’s point of view. How do you see them interacting with your site?

Just as in personal encounters – first impressions are killer. Load up your home page with clutter and you’ll lose your visitor faster than …. well, faster than my dog can woof down a hot dog.

Ponder this – what do you do when you stumble across a site that has long blocks of unbroken text on the home page? Most visitors simply glance at new pages, then maybe scan some text. They’re searching for something, so if they find that SOMETHING or even something vaguely similar, more often than not, they’ll skip everything else on that page and click through.

What are your visitors thinking? Basically, users’ habits on the Web aren’t that different from customers’ habits in a store. Once they find something of interest and click through, if the new page doesn’t immediate match up to their expectations, what do they do? HIT THE BACK BUTTON !! Why? Surfers have become accustomed to instant gratification, and if not on your site, certainly on your competition’s website.

Once you’ve captured their attention – what factors motivate visitors to convert? Converting to me could be giving up their email address, going to livechat to speak to an operator, filling in a quote request or actually calling via telephone for more info. Of course, ordering online works well also. Here, I believe great content out-trumps visual design. As far back as I can remember (in sales), solutions and NOT products or services carry the day. If your solution eases some pain & is reasonable, the odds increase exponentially that visitors will buy.

Have you ever heard the term - “Sell the Sizzle, not the Steak”? Buying means making a decision, and that decision making process begins with a need to ease some pain, then logically progresses (in person) through stages of talking, thinking and actions toward closing the sale.

Online though, there are no body clues – no sales representative to nod their head up and down, looking for a yes response, cueing the prospect to follow suit. Online, compelling landing & checkout pages are vital to your success.

Buying anything is an emotional process – for some much more so than others, like me. Using the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell to evoke an emotion (tied to your offer) helps reinforce your solution in the eyes of your prospect.

Closing the sale – isn’t simply a yes or a no. It’s a logical progression from a search query to the point “Add to Cart. “ The term, “Always Be Closing,” applies to each and every page the prospect touches until the order is completed, and really should continue beyond that, with either a survey or recommendations for other products and services based on what they just purchased.

Giving your prospect too many choices – or making the navigation from Point “Search” to Point “Buy’ difficult, is just as bad.

Revised Nov 7, 2011

Colors affect your mood – mentally and physically, and this varies by geographic location and culture, and even time. When you’re designing your website, what mood are you looking to portray – a call to action, a sense of loyalty, something safe or very professional?

As designers – we need to understand both color theory and the psychology of color, especially with ecommerce applications. Red has always been perceived as a mood stimulus invoking aggression or a call-to-action, but it can also be perceived as STOP. In China, it symbolizes celebration and luck.

Orange is actually the preferred color – for increased click-through “ADD to Cart” or “Order Here” images. For an online business, combinations in shades of red, blue and brown work well. Blue lends a perception of loyalty, while brown provides overall balance. For professional sites, white is normally a great choice, but in eastern cultures, white symbolizes coldness and sterility.

One of my favorite colors – is purple (very exotic), but purple doesn’t fit everywhere. Why do Kings, Queens and even priests wear purple robes – because purple implies royalty and sophistication. One place it does fit is in sites about interior design, accentuating wealth.

Everyone Is Going Green – because it represents nature. Its cool quality soothes, calms and has great healing powers, which is why it’s often worn in operating rooms by surgeons. If your target audience is China or France, green is not a great choice for packaging solutions. In China, green hats mean a man’s wife is cheating on him. In India, green is the color of Islam.

I just stumbled upon an article at wpmu.org - that addresses the hidden dangers of searching for free WordPress themes. With over 25 million users, WordPress dominates the blogging stratosphere. While most web hosting providers have some form of quick install for WordPress, most do not offer themes beyond the default – so where do you look for a theme that best matches your business culture, mission, services and products (safely)?

Their recommendation:

• Theme Shaper
• ThemeLab
• Theme Hybrid
• Arras Theme
• Smashing Magazine

If you want to test your theme for hidden encrypted or static info, this article does recommend some tools

• Manual base64 decode

Useful Plugins

• Theme Authenticity Checker
• Exploit Scanner
• Theme Check

Think about this for a moment. When you stumble across two websites in the same niche and one has a mix of text and graphics and the other has straight text, which would leave the better impression – given all else was equal?

First impressions are made within the first few seconds
Countless studies have concluded that first impressions are made within the first few seconds of visiting a website. Impressions based on text take longer, simply because of the time it takes to read through the content. Impressions based on a mixture of graphics and text can project a broad range of perceptions within seconds. Those could include the size of your company, the scope of the products or services you offer, and whether your visitor should hang around to shop.

An example – if you include a picture of your brick & mortar business with a mailing address, would that convert to trust and stability? If you included a picture of yourself or your staff with short bio’s, would that convert to “know” in know, like and trust – the three key ingredients to selling anything online or offline?

Can graphics be used to make a connection with your visitors?
A graphic that conveys emotion automatically makes a connection with your visitor. That connection can be one of comfort, hunger, curiosity or any number of emotions. Just as the correct use of white space can lead visitors from point A to point Purchase, graphic optimization of your website has shown to increase conversion ratios – the stuff all ecommerce entrepreneurs love.

Color themes
I’m sure you’ve stumbled on sites just as I have, that blind you with their color themes. Even if you have the best content, products and pricing, visitors will likely leave before finding that out. Don’t underestimate the importance of a good color theme.

Eye Path
Just as it’s important to be found in the first ten results on search engine queries, it’s equally important to immediately lead visitors to your website, graphically, to your Value Proposition or Unique Selling Point. Eye path should intuitively lead visitors to your Call to Action.

Product Graphics
Generally, less text in graphics implies higher quality. Great designs can double or triple your page views, return visits, time on site, and conversion ratios.

Attention to detail
I’ve also seen some shopping carts recently, where the drop down menus don’t match the images. Attention to detail is important. And I don’t know about everyone else, but small thumbnails don’t cut the mustard, if I can’t click to enlarge the image – with some solution focused caption.

Image size in bytes
Site speed is so very important now, as visitors won’t hang around waiting for images to download. I closely relate this to the fast food industry. Just last week, I waited 15 minutes in line at a drive thru, then gave up and drove to the restaurant next to it. Thankfully, my wife was understanding. I was on a you fly – I buy mission. Not only will visitors move on, but Google may penalize you in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) – further adversely affecting your conversion ratios.

Bottom Line
Great graphics unarguably translate to improved sales. If you’re selling a recurring service, one lost sale can equate to a lifetime loss of thousands of dollars. The look and feel of your website is an investment in your company or organization. Professional graphic design is well worth the investment, in both branding and sales – and first impressions!

When a visitor finds your site - imagine it’s like your best friend knocking at the front door. You want them to come in, make themselves at home and stick around awhile. Great web site design can make that happen. Whether you’re selling a product or service, or simply providing information, you want them to feel they’ve come to the right place.

Imagine you’re Judy, an online shopper - and you’re on the hunt for a flat screen TV, possibly 3-D. You start your search on Google by typing “flat screen TV”, and your search returns over 29 million results. What are the odds Judy will look beyond the first ten results? Pretty slim! What if she typed in “3D flat screen TV?” Hey, we’re down to 8 million results. Maybe she’ll check out the first two pages of results.

Local relevance is important - What if Judy didn’t want her new flat screen TV shipped from who knows where, and wanted to find one locally? What if she lives in Phoenix, AZ and typed in, “3D flat screen TV Phoenix AZ?” Not only will her search query be reduced to 32,000 results, the odds increase dramatically that she’ll search through more results to find the TV that appeals to her. She’s now very focused.What if you were selling 3D flat screen TV’s in Phoenix? Would Judy find your site? Possibly, but not necessarily. Is the verbage, 3D flat screen TV Phoenix AZ, anywhere on your site? Is your site indexed by Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Is your site in a good Internet neighborhood?
Internet neighborhoods are very much like real life neighborhoods. Ask your friend where to find that TV and I guarantee you that they (probably) won’t send you to a guy who is selling them out of the back of a truck. They’re going to point you to a reputable store. As well, it’s in the search engines best interests to point you to the most relevant websites. They have billions in advertising dollars resting on their recommendations.

What could land your website in a bad neighborhood?
Using blackhat SEO techniques jumps to the front of the line, followed very closely by allowing links back to spammers. If you’re running a blog or forum, be sure to moderate the comments and weed out the ones linking to obvious spammers.

The Power of the Internet - The Internet has leveled the playing field for many small and medium sized businesses. It’s not uncommon for many many more visitors to find you online than could ever find your brick & mortar location. Just as that sign on the front of your business and the landscaping surrounding your location is meant to draw walk-in prospects, your website is very much the online face of your business or organization. Your goal should be to make the best possible impression with each and every visitor. Following some very simple basics will help tremendously.

Visual Guidelines - It’s best to select a color theme that supports your site’s goals without overwhelming your visitors. Simple and pleasing versus busy and cluttered.

Navigational Guidelines - Make it easy to get from Point Query to Point Buy. Include FAQ’s to answer questions.

Add a Touch of Personality - Your site needs to be different from the sites your visitors just left. Add a touch of personality, but retain consistency across the entire site. Emphasize what makes your business unique.

Graphics and Text - The right mix of graphics and text is important. Long unbroken blocks of text will send visitors fleeing for the exits. Too many graphics may impair the search engines ability to index your site. You need a balance of graphics and text to make your site visually compelling.

Attention to Detail - Broken links give the impression that your business is less than professional. If your site is not in good working order, the perception is frequently that neither is your business. What you’re looking for is a quality experience with your visitors.

I know we all have our favorite links - for everything from hosting to retail outlets and services. I thought I’d ask if anyone wishes to share some of their favorite website design links?

Some of my favorites are:

Website Design Tools
Color Wheel - Color choices can make or break a website. Use the online color wheel at this site to find the right color and HTML codes for your site.

WhatTheFont - Have you ever seen a font that you like, but have no clue what it is? Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in their database.

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM.  Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page.

Webmaster Tips Library at NetMechanic are a must read for website designers. Here you’ll find in depth articles on everything from Accessibility, Search Engine Promotion, HTML Tips to Usability.

W3Schools - My absolute favorite is W3Schools. Wow, if you only link through to this one site, it’ll be worth all the others combined – it’s that good. Hungry for website design info – you can certainly fill your plate here. They even offer online developer certification courses for HTML, JavaScript, XML, ASP and PHP.

Have you ever wanted to create your own fonts? A quick Google search returned these results, plus plenty of commercial ($$$) applications.

Font Constructor - Font Constructor is a standalone mac only application to build fonts in an intuitive way.

FontForge -  An outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many macintosh font formats.

FontStruct –  Is a free font-building tool sponsored by the world’s leading retailer of digital type, FontShop. This program lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks. You create ‘FontStructions’ using the ‘FontStructor’ font editor.

Once you’re done building, FontStruct generates high-quality TrueType fonts, ready to use in any Mac or Windows application.

Raster Font Editor -  Is an easy-to-use font editor for the creation of bitmap fonts. It supports several file formats and has a very simple yet fully customizable user interface.

The application can open font resource files (*.fnt) created by other tools such as Borland’s Resource Workshop. It can import DOS 8×16 fonts, fonts from BMP images and can convert TTF fonts to raster fonts.

You can save your raster fonts as Font Resource (*.fnt), Resource Script (*.rc), Text (*.txt) and Windows Bitmap (*.bmp). Saving as Text file is useful for debugging purposes and creating text representation of characters

Type light  - Is a freeware OpenType™ font editor.  With Type light you can design, edit and convert OpenType TrueType (.ttf) and PostScript (.otf) fonts. Type light is free for personal and limited commercial use (you can sell your fonts provided that is not your profession). Please read the license.

Features:

• Convert between OpenType TrueType and OpenType PostScript fonts.
• Edit glyphs as TrueType or as standard PostScript curves.
• Create and edit fonts containing up to 65535 glyphs.
• Map glyphs to any of 65536 unicode characters.
• Input OpenType metrics, names and parameters.
• Refer to an easy to read, colour PDF manual.
• Obtain free support and technical assistance.

System requirements: Windows 98, 2000 or XP platform, 128MB min. [v3.0.011]

Selecting which color theme to use – when developing your website often comes down to selecting a pre-coded theme that appeals  to you specifically, but will your target audience perceive it the same way? After all, color is a perceptual characteristic of light. We see the visual spectrum in colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, but we also perceive color by its chroma, intensity, saturation and luminance – and more importantly, globally we perceive the same color schemes quite differently by regions and cultures.

Understanding the basics of  color helps you – develop websites that deliver your message, products or services to a targeted audience. Essentially colors are wavelengths of light that we see as reflections (those wavelengths that have not been absorbed). We identify these reflections of light with names, but in describing them we also need to examine variations – saturation, lightness, hues and so on. The color red can have variations of pink and crimson, but each of these also can be differentiated by its own chroma, saturation, intensity and luminance.

For reference, chroma is defined as how pure a hue is in relation to gray, and saturation as the degree of purity of a hue. Intensity is the brightness (or dullness) of a hue. Luminance is a measure of the amount of light reflected from a hue. Colors with higher content of white (think light bulbs) have higher luminance. Of course, unless you’re using the newest fad in energy efficient light bulbs which are about half as bright as the old ones. Back to color basics …. adding black increases the shade whereas adding white increases the tint.

Quite often I’ve been asked to match colors on a website - to those on a glossy brochure, but matching those goes beyond simply selecting the name of the color, or its chroma, intensity, saturation, luminance, shade or tint. The methods for producing perceived color vary by process. Most printing presses use combinations of Pantone colors (ink) and color copiers use combinations of CMYK toners (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) while most TVs use combinations of RGB (red, green and blue) and more recently yellow. I just read an article this morning addressing matching Pantone colors in Illustrator and Photoshop – very interesting.

To make matters worse – each person viewing your website may have their monitors color tuned differently – some to display 256 colors and others 16 million colors. Heck, some have their PC’s tied to their big screen TVs. I’m not there yet.

Web design has become a hot topic recently (updated)

Everywhere you look, there’s advice on what works and what doesn’t work in web design (including coding for SEO). While the intent of websites is to convey information, the design of your site weighs heavily whether anyone will actually find and read your content. If you’re running ecommerce, design becomes critical.

Users spend most of their time on OTHER websites
Their experiences on other websites form their expectations for YOUR website. Take some time to research what others in your industry are posting. Your competitor may market inferior products and services, but still outsell you online. Why? The perceived value of their products and services may be enhanced because of the way they’re presented online.

What turns users OFF?

• Excessive use of flash
• Poor navigation
• Excessive use of animated GIFs
• Obtrusive background images
• Unreadable font and background color combinations
• Clutter
• Blinking or scrolling text
• Blatant keyword stuffing
• Irrelevant content based on their search query
• Broken links
• Splash pages with no important information
• Internal links that pop up in new windows
• Itty bitty type points
• No way back to the previous page
• No way back to the home page
• More than 2 or 3 consecutive words in ALL CAPS
• For ecommerce – NO PRICING
• Poor grammar
• Audio with no OFF option or auto loading
• Loooooooooooong paragraphs
• Embarrassing misspellings
• Slooooooooooooow page loading times

What turns users ON?
This ties directly to what users become accustomed to on other sites. You don’t have to spend thousands on design work – just enough to give you an edge or a niche. Of course, these help:

• Effective use of flash
• Fast page load times
• Appropriate amount of white space
• Relevant content based on search query
• For ecommerce – PRICING
• Inuitive navigation
• Unique theme with READABLE font and background color combinations
• Professionally written content
• Easy to get from Point “Search Query” to Point “Buy”

Recommendations

• If your plan is to make money from advertising, then go for a ratio of not less than 70-80% editorial to 20-30% advertising.
• Avoid pop up windows unless it’s for a feature like LiveChat.
• Compress your images to increase your load times.
• Don’t make any line of text longer than 500 pixels. Longer lines of text make it difficult for the viewer to scan back to the next line.
• Increase your leading (the space between lines) to at least 1.5. This will help readibility.
• Don’t underline words if they’re not hyperlinks, and do use color/descriptive words to highlight links.
• Test your links frequently to assure they’re functioning correctly.
• Don’t hotlink to other sites (other than your own).

Designing your site for e-commerce – begins with keyword research, matching keywords and phrases that most closely match today’s search queries. Why? Because designing a site with keywords or phrases that no one searches for makes conversions very very difficult (lack of traffic). Of course you can still advertise via article, blog and forum posting, or micro-sites, which should provide some very targeted leads, but you lose the viral power of organic search results.

I’ve seen sites that dominate –  SERPS (search engine results pages) for their particular niche, but can’t convert a prospect. Frequently, keyword research reveals that NO ONE is searching for that niche. In simple terms, if you’re getting 6 pageviews/month, it doesn’t matter if you have the best design, intuitive navigation and a kick a** shopping cart, your ROI (return on investment) will suffer.

Taking keywords one step further - selling anything is about the perception of providing value & solutions, and this applies to everything from selling toothpaste to cloud hosting – which leads us to Landing Pages and relevancy, and on to compelling calls-to-action. The words you use cross-site and intra-site need to be relevant to the search query. Getting traffic from a search query that leads to a product or service that’s either in conflict with the search, unreadable (poor theme or contrast), not compelling or out of alignment with the rest of the industry won’t convert well.

My recommendation - absolutely use keyword research tools to match the products and services you want to sell – with the keywords and keyword phrases currently entered into search queries – that will produce sufficient traffic to sustain and grow your business.

I routinely stumble across – WordPress sites using default themes … and move on. More often than not, their content is composed entirely of Google Adsense ads and RSS’ed articles. The good news is I also routinely find WordPress sites with beautifully customized themes, many of them corporate websites. And they were designed by the average Joe, with information freely available on the Internet.

For the average WordPress author – WYSIWYG works well. You can switch back and forth between HTML and Visual window panes to create an impressive website. Part of the recent popularity with WordPress though, can be attributed to the ability to customize its platform.

Custom fields can be anything from – storing URL’s of images that can be pulled to the home page to create magazine style layouts – to adding HTML to your post titles.  

What’s to gain by customizing your site? My answer is ‘perception of value’ to your targeted audience. Value drives traffic, rankings, SERPS and conversions.

To explore the - possibilities of using custom fields to fully personalize your website, I recommend:

10 Awesome Things To Do With WordPress’ Custom Fields

Successful websites, in other words – sites that receive lots of relevant traffic, incorporate measured amounts of white space to:

• Ensure legibility & readability
• Enhance attractiveness & professional image, and
• Solidify brand awareness 

Cross Industry Tips
White space is any space that isn’t occupied by other visible elements. This can be the space between characters, words, lines, paragraphs, images and sections of your website. Whereas the direct mail industry leans to big, bold and in-your-face (minimal white space) because that’s what works for them, this strategy doesn’t transcend well to websites.

The newspaper industry has a term called “above the fold.” I used to be newspaper reporter (long ago), for a small weekly published in Pensacola, FL. In terms of value, everything on the front page was gold. Who wants their story buried 6 pages back? Websites share that dilemma as well. Everything displayed without scrolling attributes to first impressions.

Whitespace Balance
While a large part of the battle is just getting prospects to your site, the next battle is keeping them there. If you use too little white space, your site may appear cluttered, and too much white space, seem empty. White space is an important facet of a website’s design, as it compliments your site’s content, helping to emphasize your products or services.

White space helps navigation
Active white space, or white space that’s intentionally added, can help visitors to your site navigate easier, by providing structure for your navigation bar, content, header and footer. Content that is structured and follows a predictable pattern throughout your site helps visitors find the information that brought them to your site from search queries or other marketing strategies.

Passive white space, on the other hand is not so clearly defined. Some say it’s the product of poor layout design. Others contend it’s more about modifying space to improve the readability of your content – type family, letter spacing, line length and leading (space between the lines). These tie directly to readability and legibility.

Readability and Legibility
You can have the best, well thought out and researched content, but if it’s not easily readable, your visitors will move on to other sites. If your selection of color schemes – font versus background colors clash, your visitors will move on to other sites. If you write in long unbroken blocks of text, your visitors will …. you get the point!

An example – which is easier to read?

Hard copy newspapers are expected to have dense content, but they still need to be readable. Websites, on the other hand, need an industry specific blend or balance of white space. Generally, the more upscale your product is, the more white space is used to portray its value. Overlaying images of  products on your website with cluttered or in-your-face bold text diminishes the perception of its value.

How does white space brand your product or service?

My recommendation
First, research what your competitors are presenting online. Why? Because your visitors either just came from their site, or will visit their site after leaving yours. Comparison shopping on the Internet has never been easier. What will set your site apart, aside from your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? Optimizing your site for the right balance of white space may not seem important, but image or the perception of value is so much more important than it used to be. Selling on price alone rarely works long term. Branding your business image helps you own your niche in the industry.

CSS

• http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp  CSS Tutorial
• http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/  CSS Beginner Tutorial | HTML Dog
• http://www.webchicklet.com/css/taking-the-plunge-learning-css/  Taking The Plunge: Learning CSS
• http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/tutorial_intro.htm  Selectutorial: Tutorial introduction

Flash

• http://www.w3schools.com/flash/default.asp  Flash Tutorial
• http://www.entheosweb.com/Flash/default.asp  Flash Tutorials
• http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/  Learn Flash | Adobe Flash Developer Center

HTML

• http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp  HTML Tutorial
• http://www.htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/  HTML Beginner Tutorial | HTML Dog
• http://functionx.com/html/index.htm  HTML Tutorial – FunctionX

Java

• http://www.codetoad.com/java/  Java Source Code, Java Applets, Java JSP and Servlets, Java Applications.
• http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Java/1  Java Tutorials – Tutorialized
• http://www.developer.com/java/  Your Source for Java Information – Developer.com’s

Javascript

• http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp  JavaScript Tutorial – FunctionX
• http://www.tizag.com/javascriptT/  XHTML Introduction
• http://functionx.com/javascript/index.htm  XHTML Tutorials, XHTML W3C Recommendations, Editors, Tools, Resources, Books – Web Site Resources, Website Tips – WebsiteTips.com

As you search the Internet for squeeze page strategies, remember that the rules (Google algorithms) were changed recently, and many once successful one page squeeze pages fell by the wayside. But before I get ahead of myself, what exactly are squeeze pages?

By definition – Once upon a time, squeeze pages were defined as a single web page with the sole purpose of capturing information for follow-up marketing. The ultimate goal of the page was to obtain the visitor’s email address. Why? To build a list of highly targeted prospects (seems fairly simple).

Times have changed – To avoid penalties and drops in SERPS (search engine results pages), squeeze pages are now being designed across multiple pages, each with relevant content. The goal however remains the same – to build a list that affords you the opportunity to present visitors with multiple sales messages over time, develop relationships, and cross-sell other products.

Conversion Strategies – will vary depending on your goal. The best conversion strategies focus on benefits and solutions. These can be either short or long term. Success stories work well, as do freebies – but we need to backtrack again. With the onslaught of spam, convincing anyone to give up their email address means your sales copy has to be compelling and you have to convey trust.

The Trust Factor – is huge, and I contend it’s the most important element of your site. Prospects buy from sales reps, businesses and organizations they know, like and TRUST. So how can you demonstrate trust online?

• Add Your Picture
• Add Your Signature
• Proofread your copy for spelling and grammatical structure
• Have a Privacy Policy
• Use Color Psychology

Successful Squeeze Pages – often use a short video and opt in form at the very top of the home page for visitors who want to sign up immediately, followed by content that essentially explains benefits and solutions in greater detail – with another opt in form at the bottom.

In business, there are moments that are definitely memorable, like your Grand Opening, hanging up your business sign, hiring your first employee, filing your first tax return or closing your first big deal.

Another would be your website going live. It says to the world, here I am – on an entirely different level. I remember the original website for our Salon was through Sam’s Club Business Member Plus option. It was free, as I remember, but their design options were proprietary and I moved on to FrontPage for more design control. Yes, I know some of you are saying, yipes! Hey, it’s what I knew at the time.

That website has changed over the years and I’ve moved beyond FrontPage to Dreamweaver and Expression Web. With the latest releases of software, your design options are virtually unlimited.

Where am I going with this? Your website, which represents the face of your business online, need not just one memorable moment. Give your website a facelift to trend with the time – make TODAY memorable.

Have you ever wondered why that beautifully designed site you created looks fabulous on your PC, but not on others – aside from differences in browsers? Why does that bold font that screams BUY ME on my PC display as Times Roman on my wife’s computer?

The answer is that fonts are operating system resources, meaning you can see that font only when it’s installed on the specific PC that is viewing your site. Default fonts rarely resemble the font you intended.

Is that font a must have?
If you absolutely need that font on your website, it is possible to set up your site so that others can view it as you do on your computer, but that comes at a price, not in money, but …

Embedded Fonts
It is possible to embed fonts on your website, so when your wife or another visitor views your site, that beautiful font will embed itself on their computer, enabling them to see what you see at your PC. The downside is that this adds another layer to your site. That layer is download time, sometimes as much as 20 to 25k per font.

Who is Your Target Audience?
If your target audience is rural Illinois, then download speed is critically important, as much of the rural Midwest is still locked into dial-up. On the other hand, if your target audience is urban America, broadband will help.

Which Font to Use?
I recently did a query for free fonts which returned nearly 12 million results. The possibilities are virtually endless. So, first you find the font you want and use it on your site, then create an embedded font file and finally, attach that font to your style sheet.

The Designer’s Dilemma
As a designer, you can’t control an individual browser’s display, but by embedding that font in the site’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you can cause your font to download with the website page. A word of caution – not all designers allow their fonts to be embedded. Hmm .. An alternative solution could be to use a commercial package, such as TypeKit, a subscription-based service for linking to high-quality Open Type fonts from some of the worlds best type foundries. Their fonts are served from a global network on redundant servers, offering bulletproof service and incredible speed.

Databinding – A pattern is a single XPath expression returning one or more XML Schema nodes. Each pattern has been allocated a stable URI and classified as being either:

The Working Group developed a processor which may be used to detect patterns exhibited by an XML Schema or WSDL document.

DOM – The Document Object Model is a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents.

Efficient XML Interchange - The objective of the Efficient XML Interchange Working Group is to develop a specification for an encoding format that allows efficient interchange of the XML Information Set, and to illustrate effective processor implementations of that encoding. This work is based on the conclusions of the XML Binary Characterization Working Group.

Geolocation – The mission of the Geolocation Working Group, part of the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity, is to define a secure and privacy-sensitive interface for using client-side location information in location-aware Web applications.

eGovernment – eGovernment at W3C – improving access to government through better use of the Web

GRDDL – GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. The GRDDL specification introduces markup for declaring that an XML document includes gleanable data and for linking to an algorithm, typically represented in XSLT, for gleaning the resource descriptions from the document.

Health Care and Life Sciences  – The mission of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine and health care. These domains stand to gain tremendous benefit by adoption of Semantic Web technologies, as they depend on the interoperability of information from many domains and processes for efficient decision support. Patent Policy – The Patent Policy Activity’s goal is to enable W3C to implement and successfully operate the W3C Patent Policy, put into place in February 2004. While the work of developing and implementing the Patent Policy is complete, we believe that it is important that the W3C community have an organized way to monitor application of the Policy as well as remain informed about relevant development in the legal and standards environment.

PICS – The PICS (TM) specification enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content. It was originally designed to help parents and teachers control what children access on the Internet, but it also facilitates other uses for labels, including code signing and privacy. The PICS platform is one on which other rating services and filtering software have been built.

PNG – PNG is an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel for transparency. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits per component (up to 48bit images for RGB, or 64bit for RGBA). 

HTML – HTML is the publishing language of the World Wide Web.

HTML Tidy – Clean up your Web pages with HTML TIDY

HTML Validator – Validate by URI

HTTP – HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Incubator - Incubator Activity

InkML – InkML is an XML data format for representing digital ink data that is input with an electronic pen or stylus as part of a multimodal system. In the context of the W3C Multimodal Interaction Framework, the markup provides a format for:

• transferring digital ink data between devices and software components
• storing hand-input traces for:
  • Handwriting recognition (including text, mathematics, chemistry)
  • Signature verification
  • Gesture interpretation

Internationalization – The W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to make it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures. From this page you can find articles and other resources about Web internationalization, and information about the groups that make up the Activity.

Jigsaw – Jigsaw is W3C’s leading-edge Web server platform, providing a sample HTTP 1.1 implementation and a variety of other features on top of an advanced architecture implemented in Java. The W3C Jigsaw Activity statement explains the motivation and future plans in more detail. Jigsaw is an W3C Open Source Project, started May 1996.

Libwww - Libwww is a highly modular, general-purpose client side Web API written in C for Unix and Windows (Win32). It’s well suited for both small and large applications, like browser/editors, robots, batch tools, etc. Pluggable modules provided with libwww include complete HTTP/1.1 (with caching, pipelining, PUT, POST, Digest Authentication, deflate, etc), MySQL logging, FTP, HTML/4, XML (expat), RDF (SiRPAC), WebDAV, and much more. The purpose of libwww is to serve as a testbed for protocol experiments.

MathML  – MathML is a low-level specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication. It provides a much needed foundation for the inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages

Media Annotations – The mission of the Media Annotations Working Group, part of the Video in the Web Activity, is to provide an ontology and API designed to facilitate cross-community data integration of information related to media objects in the Web, such as video, audio and images.

Media Fragments – The mission of the Media Fragments Working Group, part of the Video in the Web Activity, is to address temporal and spatial media fragments in the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).

Mobile Web Initiative (W3C-MWI) – The Mobile Web Initiative’s goal is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality, explains Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web. W3C and mobile industry leaders are working together to improve Web content production and access for mobile users and the greater Web.

Multimodal Interaction – The Multimodal Interaction Activity seeks to extend the Web to allow users to dynamically select the most appropriate mode of interaction for their current needs, including any disabilities, whilst enabling developers to provide an effective user interface for whichever modes the user selects. Depending upon the device, users will be able to provide input via speech, handwriting, and keystrokes, with output presented via displays, pre-recorded and synthetic speech, audio, and tactile mechanisms such as mobile phone vibrators and Braille strips.

OWL – OWL is a Web Ontology language. Where earlier languages have been used to develop tools and ontologies for specific user communities (particularly in the sciences and in company-specific e-commerce applications), they were not defined to be compatible with the architecture of the World Wide Web in general, and the Semantic Web in particular.

OWL uses both URIs for naming and the description framework for the Web provided by RDF to add the following capabilities to ontologies:

• Ability to be distributed across many systems
• Scalability to Web needs
• Compatibility with Web standards for accessibility and internationalization
• Openess and extensiblility

OWL builds on RDF and RDF Schema and adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.

POWDER – The POWDER Working Group is specifying a protocol for publishing descriptions of (e.g. metadata about) Web resources using RDF, OWL, and HTTP.

Privacy and P3P – Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project – Enabling smarter Privacy Tools for the Web

RDF – The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.

Rules - The mission of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group is to produce W3C Recommendations for rules interchange

Security – The Web Security Context Working Group (part of the Security Activity) is chartered to specify a baseline set of security context information that should be accessible to Web users, and practices for the secure and usable presentation of this information, to enable users to come to a better understanding of the context that they are operating in when making trust decisions on the Web.

Semantic Web – The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Service Modeling Language (SML) – The mission of the Service Modeling Language (SML) Working Group, part of the XML Activity, is to produce W3C Recommendations for Service Modeling Language by refining the “Service Modeling Language” (SML) Member Submission, addressing implementation experience and feedback for the specifications.

SMIL – The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced “smile”) enables simple authoring of interactive audiovisual presentations. SMIL is typically used for “rich media”/multimedia presentations which integrate streaming audio and video with images, text or any other media type. SMIL is an easy-to-learn HTML-like language, and many SMIL presentations are written using a simple text-editor.

SOAP/XMLP – The Working Group is responsible for updating errata documents and publishing new editions of the SOAP 1.2, XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP), and SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) W3C Recommendations, incorporating published errata.

In addition to the maintenance effort, the XML Protocol Working Group is chartered to work on SOAP Version 1.2 extensions. The Group will produce a Web Services Policy (WS Policy) assertion for MTOM, using the W3C Member submission MTOM Serialization Policy Assertion (WS-MTOMPolicy), and will continue the work the SOAP One way MEP, a Message Exchange Pattern describing one-way SOAP messaging.

SOAP-JMS – The mission of the SOAP-JMS Binding Working Group, part of the Web Services Activity, is to produce a W3C Recommendation for how SOAP should bind to a transport that supports the Java™ Message Service (JMS) api by refining the “SOAP over Java™ Message Service 1.0” Member Submission. In the case of SOAP 1.2 this binding must use the SOAP Protocol Binding Framework defined by the XML Protocol Working Group.

SPARQL – The Working Group is currently working on identifying potential language and protocol extensions.

Style – Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. W3C has actively promoted the use of style sheets on the Web since the Consortium was founded in 1994. The Style Activity has produced several W3C Recommendations (CSS1, CSS2, XPath, XSLT). CSS especially is widely implemented in browsers.   

By attaching style sheets to structured documents on the Web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags.

The easiest way to start experimenting with style sheets is to find a browser that supports CSS.

SVG – SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML. SVG 1.1 is a W3C Recommendation and is the most recent version of the full specification. SVG Tiny 1.2 is a W3C Recommendation, and targets mobile devices.

TAG – W3C has created the TAG to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

Timed Text – The mission of the Timed Text Working Group, part of the Video in the Web Activity, is to produce a W3C Recommendation for media online captioning by refining the W3C specification Timed Text (TT) Authoring Format 1.0 — Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP) based in implementation experience and interoperability feedback.

URI/URL – Naming and Addressing: URIs, URLs, …

Validators – The Basics – what you should run on all your web pages

• The MarkUp Validator. – Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.
• The Link Checker – Checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links, etc.
• The CSS Validator – validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.

The above three can be used all-in-one by running the Log Validator. Unlike the others, this tool helps improve the quality of a whole site, step by step, by finding the most popular documents that need to be fixed in priority.

Video - Following the workshop in Video on the Web, the goal of the Video in the Web activity is to make video a “first class citizen” of the Web. Video on the Web (and this includes audio, as the two are typically used together) has seen explosive growth, improving the richness of the user experience but leading to challenges in content discovery, searching, indexing and accessibility. Enabling users (from individuals to large organizations) to put video in the Web requires that we build a solid architectural foundation that enables people to create, navigate, search, link and distribute video, effectively making video part of the Web instead of an extension that doesn’t take full advantage of the Web architecture.

Voice – Applying Web technology to enable users to access services from their telephone via a combination of speech and DTMF.

Ubiquitous Web Applications – The UWA Working Group focuses on extending the Web to enable distributed applications of many kinds of devices including sensors and effectors. Application areas include home monitoring and control, home entertainment, office equipment, mobile and automotive.

WAI – The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

Web Applications – The W3C Web Applications (WebApps) Working Group, a merger of the WebAPI and WAF Working Groups, is chartered to develop standard APIs for client-side Web Application development. This work will include both documenting existing APIs such as XMLHttpRequest and developing new APIs in order to enable richer web applications.

Web Architecture (TAG) – W3C has created the TAG to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

WebCGM – Computer Graphics Metafile, or CGM, is an ISO standard for tree-structured, binary graphics format that has been adopted especially by the technical industries (defense, aviation, transportation, etc) for technical illustration in electronic documents.

Web Services – The goal of the Web Services Activity is to develop a set of technologies in order to lead Web services to their full potential.

Widgets – The W3C Web Applications Working Group is working on a suite of Widgets specifications.

WS-Addressing – The purpose of the Web Services Addressing Working Group, part of the Web Services Activity, is to produce a W3C Recommendation for Web Services Addressing by refining the W3C Member Submission “WS-Addressing” based on consideration of the importance of this component in the Web Services architecture, implementation experience, and interoperability feedback. WS-Addressing defines how message headers direct messages to a service or agent, provides an XML format for exchanging endpoint references, and defines mechanisms to direct replies or faults to a specific location.

WS-CDL – Web Services Choreography Working Group

WS-Resource Access - The mission of the Web Services Resource Access Working Group, part of the Web Services Activity, is to produce W3C Recommendations for a set of Web Services specifications by refining the WS-Transfer, WS-ResourceTransfer, WS-Enumeration, WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Eventing Member Submissions (referred to in this charter as “the submitted specifications”), addressing existing issues in those specifications, implementation experience and interoperability feedback from implementers and considering composition with other Web services standards.

WSDL – Web Services Description Working Group

WS-Policy – The mission of the Web Services Policy Working Group, part of the Web Services Activity, is to produce W3C Recommendations for Web Services Policy by refining the “WS-Policy” Member Submission, addressing implementation experience and interoperability feedback from the specifications, maximizing compatibility with existing policy assertions (as defined in the Scope section), and considering composition with other components in the Web services architecture.

XForms - The Forms working group is chartered by the W3C to develop the next generation of forms technology for the world wide web. The mission is to address the patterns of intricacy, dynamism, multi-modality, and device independence that have become prevalent in Web Forms Applications around the world. The technical reports of this working group have the root name XForms due to the use of XML to express the vocabulary of the forms technology developed by the working group

XHTML – The mission of the XHTML2 Working Group is to fulfill the promise of XML for applying XHTML to a wide variety of platforms with proper attention paid to internationalization, accessibility, device-independence, usability and document structuring. The group will provide an essential piece for supporting rich Web content that combines XHTML with other W3C work on areas such as math, scalable vector graphics, synchronized multimedia, and forms, in cooperation with other Working Groups.

XHTML2 – The mission of the XHTML2 Working Group is to fulfill the promise of XML for applying XHTML to a wide variety of platforms with proper attention paid to internationalization, accessibility, device-independence, usability and document structuring. The group will provide an essential piece for supporting rich Web content that combines XHTML with other W3C work on areas such as math, scalable vector graphics, synchronized multimedia, and forms, in cooperation with other Working Groups.

XLink - This specification defines the XML Linking Language (XLink), which allows elements to be inserted into XML documents in order to create and describe links between resources. It uses XML syntax to create structures that can describe the simple unidirectional hyperlinks of today’s HTML, as well as more sophisticated links.

XML – Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere.

XML Base – XML Base (Second Edition)

XML Key Management - The mission of this working group is to develop a specification of XML application/protocol that allows a simple client to obtain key information (values, certificates, management or trust data) from a web service. This specification will be based on the XML Key Management Specification (XKMS).

XML Processing – The XML Specification defines an interchange format for structured information, but does not define how that format is to be used. Other specifications, such as XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude and XML Canonicalization define transformations that operate on and produce XML documents. The order in which these transformations are to be applied is not specified anywhere, even though applying them in different orders will in general yield different results.

The ability to specify the order, parameters, and expected results of such transformations in a standard way would be highly beneficial for interoperability between systems using different sets of processors for these transformations.

Two distinct perspectives can be identified: A scripting perspective, in which an independent XML document specifies the sequence of operations to be performed, and a self-describing perspective, in which a document is understood as signalling its own processing.

With respect to the scripting perspective, the group should define a language in which this can be expressed. This XML Processing language should allow users to specify the pipeline processing of XML documents, for example using multiple XSLT stylesheets as part of general data processing with XML.

XML Query – XQuery is a standardized language for combining documents, databases, Web pages and almost anything else. It is very widely implemented. It is powerful and easy to learn.

XQuery is replacing proprietary middleware languages and Web Application development languages. XQuery is replacing complex Java or C++ programs with a few lines of code. XQuery is simpler to work with and easier to maintain than many other alternatives.

XML Schema – XML Schemas express shared vocabularies and allow machines to carry out rules made by people. They provide a means for defining the structure, content and semantics of XML documents. in more detail. XML Schema was approved as a W3C Recommendation on 2 May 2001 and a second edition incorporating many errata was published on 28 October 2004

XML Signature and Encryption – The Group is part of the Security Activity. It takes up prior W3C Work on XML Signature and XML Encryption, as well as work from the XML Security Specifications Maintenance Working Group, that produced XML Signature, Second Edition.

XPath - XSL is a family of recommendations for defining XML document transformation and presentation. It consists of three parts:

XSL Transformations (XSLT)

a language for transforming XML

the XML Path Language (XPath)

an expression language used by XSLT to access or refer to parts of an XML document. (XPath is also used by the XML Linking specification)

XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO)

an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics

An XSLT stylesheet specifies the presentation of a class of XML documents by describing how an instance of the class is transformed into an XML document that uses a formatting vocabulary, such as (X)HTML or XSL-FO.

XPointer – W3C XML Pointer, XML Base and XML Linking

XSL and XSLT – XSL is a family of recommendations for defining XML document transformation and presentation.

W3C (http://validator.w3.org/) has a free validator service that allows you to check the markup (HTML, XHTML .. of website documents. Simply type in the URL of your website and watch all the warnings and infractions pop up.

So why is validation important if every URL I check has numerous errors?

We all know that pages on the Internet are written in a variety of computer languages that allow website designers and authors to structure text, add multimedia content and specify its resulting appearance or style. Each of these languages has their own grammar, vocabulary and syntax. Pages that are written that do NOT follow these rules are ‘less than good’ pages.

A valid Web page is not necessarily a good web page, but an invalid Web page has little chance of being a good web page.

Pages written in English that contain broken or run on sentences, misspelled words or lack substance – give the perception of diminished value. Pages written with poor validation present a diminished value to the major search engines.

The combination of both – proper English and valid code, combined with relevant content and graphic design incorporating flash or other elements of visual impact are the defining pieces of the pie that draw and keep visitors on your website.

OK, you worked through some tutorials – on FrontPage and posted your first website many years ago. Yes, it had some bloated code, but it looked great to you. And it made you some money. Since then, you’ve invested in Dreamweaver and just recently Expression Web 2. CSS style sheets aren’t new to you but there are so many neat addons now, you can’t decide what to keep and which to throw away. More and more prospects are asking for all sorts of things they’ve seen elsewhere on the Internet, and assume you can develop anything – for next to nothing, especially shopping carts.

Lately, your shared host has been getting – some awful reviews on forums, so you’re starting to become concerned. Will they fall by the wayside because of the negative publicity, or are their problems going to fall your way? You hope not, but don’t know how to protect yourself. After all, you now have quite a few clients hosted with your provider, and don’t want to lose any of them.

Should you add new clients to – a different host and keep the ones you have with your current provider? Or move your current clientele as your existing plan expires?

These are real life dilemmas facing – quite a few web designers, at least from the number and content of threads I read day in and day out.

For hosting, cheap doesn’t – relate to quality. It doesn’t in any industry. What are YOUR requirements? Post these on a forum and prepare to be shocked by the response you receive – in a good way. One of the better forums is WHT at www.webhostingtalk.com.

I’ve read quite a few posts from OP’s (original posters) in forums asking questions related to brower compatibilty. In general, most threads start with something like, “My design works in all other browsers, but not in IE6. Why is this?” Of course, some of the comments are a bit more laden with frustration.

Could be either browser compatibility problems or HTML code errors.
While there are rules for HTML compatibility, there is room for interpretation. For example, HTML standards say that the table tag should support a cellspacing attribute to define the space between parts of the table, but those standards don’t define the default value for that attribute. So unless you explicitly define cellspacing when building your page, two browsers may use different amounts of white space in your table.

Support for HTML tags isn’t universal
Support for the newest HTML tags isn’t yet universal, so you could be building your pages with parts of the HTML language that not all browsers understand. Thus, different browsers will ignore that part of your page they can’t translate, affecting the display of your pages. A good rule of thumb is to design your pages to work for the last two versions of the major browsers. A small minority of Internet surfers still use older versions of browsers which may or may not display properly.

Font size and availability
I think two of the major culprits are font availability and font size. These are resources that can change from PC to PC. What looks great on your PC in an exotic font could display as Arial on another PC. You can avoid font size issues by using Cascading Style Sheets to set your font size in pixels.

HTML Errors
The major browsers are quite robust, thus forgive many HTML errors, but not all browsers forgive the same errors. Your favorite browser may display your Web page without error, but another browser may be seriously affected by the same error. HTML errors are the leading cause of display problems between browsers.