Well the folks that brought you the most easily infected PC operating system, and the buggiest and most non-compliant web browser, have done it again. Their latest invention is a crawler robot that may end up costing you money.

All of the major search engines have robot computers that are known as crawlers, bots, and spyders. Their job is to go to web sites and follow all the links and then index those pages, follow the links on those pages, and go on and on and on. That’s how the internet is indexed these days. All well and good. Until Microsoft designed their bot.

The search engine bots are supposed to have a minimal impact on your web site, coming by for a taste now and then. If they try to devour the whole meal at once it can impact your server, slowing it down for your visitors.

This month after receiving the bill from my hosting provider, I noticed that I was charged extra for going over my bandwidth limit. That was the first time I ever experienced this so I did a bit of investigation.

One account on my server was way above normal usage and after looking at the logs, I noticed that search engine bots were way over represented in the stats than they should have been. Drilling down into those stats I found that bingbot, Microsoft’s bot for their Bing search site accounted for 19% of the site’s traffic. It was hitting my site so often that it totally skewed the Webalizer stats for the month.

The problem seems to have resulted in a voting script that I recently added and bingbot was trying every voting link which seems to have put it in an endless loop. For a long time bots ignored URL’s with question marks in them because only dynamically served pages would have them and the bots could quite often be caught up in endless loops when trying to follow them. Apparently the engineers at Microsoft thought they were smart enough to venture into the rough waters of dynamic URL’s, but they forgot to bring their lifeboats with them in case they needed to abandon ship.

Their foolhardy venture cost me a small amount this month, and I’ve put some modifications into my robot.txt file to keep them out of that part of the site. Hopefully they will grab the updated robot.txt file soon and pay attention to it.

Just for the record, here are all the IP addresses I found in the logs during a one hour period that can be traced to bingbot. At some points there were up to 4 different bingbots hitting my site at the same time! In all, in just this random 1 hour time frame that I picked, 34 different bingbots hit my site 94 times. Mostly indexing the same 15 pages over and over again.

65.52.108.12
65.52.110.17
65.52.110.18
65.52.110.28
65.52.110.29
65.52.110.34
65.52.110.35
65.52.110.41
65.52.110.44
65.52.110.52
65.52.110.69
65.52.110.72
65.52.110.78
65.52.110.81
65.52.110.87
65.52.110.92
207.46.13.100
207.46.13.147
207.46.13.148
207.46.13.45
207.46.13.84
207.46.13.87
207.46.13.89
207.46.13.96
207.46.195.226
207.46.199.40
207.46.204.182
207.46.204.182
207.46.204.188
207.46.204.192
207.46.204.232
207.46.204.234
207.46.204.236
207.46.204.240

Apparently, I’m not the first to experience a bingbot binge.

I’ve used Seth Knorr’s Novice Form PHP script (nvform.php) on a few web sites to do the HTML form to email processing because it is an easy way to implement that common task. I’ve made a few changes to the script for my own use, such as adding a section to combat form spam. Recently a client asked me if I could have the email only list the fields that were filled in. On his web site we are using the script to process a form with a lot of fields, and the email ended up being 4 pages long when printed.

I figured this would be an easy change but when I looked at the code, it wasn’t obvious to me where to make the change. So I went to Google for an answer, and while I found others asking the same question in various forums, no one had answered the question.

So back to the code I went, studying it for where it was writing the email text. One thing about PHP is that you aren’t forced to write the code following any rules for line breaks, indents and such, so following someone else’s writing style can sometimes throw you. In this case I found an ELSE clause at the end of a line that I missed the first few times while reading the code.

Once I noticed that, the change I needed to make was very simple, and here is the answer. Find this line of code:

if ( $NVPOST_name == "subject" || $NVPOST_name == "sort" || $NVPOST_name == "required" || $NVPOST_name == "success_page"){}else{

and change it to this:

if ($NVPOST_value == "" || $NVPOST_name == "subject" || $NVPOST_name == "sort" || $NVPOST_name == "required" || $NVPOST_name == "success_page"){}else{

That’s all there is to it!

Personally I would have written the statement like this, which is easier for me to see the logic.

if ($NVPOST_value == "" || $NVPOST_name == "subject" || $NVPOST_name == "sort" || $NVPOST_name == "required" || $NVPOST_name == "success_page"){
    /* don't print anything */
} else {
    $SEND_prnt .= "$NVPOST_name; $NVPOST_value \n";
}

For the last two weeks I have been tracking down why all of the sudden, with no changes on my part, the Akismet plug-in for one of my clients stopped working. I noticed it right away because without the plug-in working, I was getting inundated with lots of spam comments on the WordPress blog.

I logged into their WordPress blog and noticed a banner at the top of the page that read:

Akismet has detected a problem. A server or network problem is preventing Akismet from working correctly. Click here for more information about how to fix the problem.

So I clicked there and got another page where this was listed.

Unable to reach any Akismet servers.

A network problem or firewall is blocking all connections from your web server to Akismet.com. Akismet cannot work correctly until this is fixed. Please contact your web host or firewall administrator and give them this information about Akismet and firewalls.

This particular client is not hosted on one of my servers, but is instead hosted by CBeyond. So I opened up a trouble ticket with CBeyond. I inquired if they were doing any blocking and they said no. They also said there weren’t any changes made to the server recently. But something obviously changed because it had been working and in fact it had to have worked at some point because the API key had been validated.

So off to the internet for the answer and I found lots of people that had experienced this problem, with only a few answers. A big problem was that in one version, the Akismet plug-in had a problem where it would intermittently fail to connect. But since I had the latest version this didn’t apply, and my problem certainly wasn’t intermittent.

Akismet’s FAQ mentions that the connectivity problem could either be system related or firewall related, so I started out checking each item one by one. First there are two PHP functions that need to be enabled. fsockopen and gethostbynamel.

To check the output of these two functions, I have written a simple script which you can download as a zip file. Just unpack the script, FTP it to your server (preferably into your WordPress directory) and then run it.

Download akismet-test.zip

In my case it ended up that the gethostbynamel function wasn’t working although it was enabled. It was returning an IP address of 0.0.0.0 and CBeyond’s tech support couldn’t figure out why this started happening. I’m not very impressed with CBeyond’s tech support as it appears to be out-sourced with the usual language barries and form replies that have nothing to do with the question being asked. Their final advice was to move the account to one of their newer servers which should fix the problem, but it going to be a disruption to the client and more work for me.

Humboldt County is a wonderful place to live, with its natural beauty and relaxed lifestyle, but as the traditional industries such as logging and fishing are disappearing, many people wonder how they can continue living here. The Internet offers one solution, as it is now possible to sell your products or services through a web site to a national or even international clientele, while enjoying the lower cost of living in Humboldt County. Web design itself is what allowed my wife and I to relocate to Ferndale in 2000.

If you are a business owner in Eureka, Fortuna, Arcata, Ferndale, or any other area of Humboldt County and you’re looking for someone to design your web site, you of course have many options even in this mostly rural area. The introduction of easy to use web site building tools has made it easy for almost anyone to design a web site, and sometimes it’s tempting for business owners to take the DIY approach. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. There is so much more to creating a successful web site than just mastering HTML.

First, there’s aesthetics. Yes, there’s a reason I named my web design company Aesthetic Design & Photography. The web is a visual product, and the choice of colors, fonts, and other design elements must merge harmoniously, while effectively conveying the image that the client wishes to portray. The web design chosen must also work well with any number of different browsers, computer operating systems, and personal settings. Before the web came along, my background was in programming, graphic arts and photography, and a successful web site design is a combination of those three skills.

As important as it is for the site to look like it was professionally crafted, it’s even more important that your site can be found by your potential customers both in and out of Humboldt County. Too often, people starting a web based business take the approach, “Build it and they will come.” Unless your business is selling a product or service that is unique and highly in demand, you’re probably like the rest of us and you have competitors. Unless you can stand out above your competitors, your customers have no reason to choose you. So you really need to target your site to attract your best potential customer. This is where hiring a professional web designer really pays off, because Search Engine Optimization should be designed into the site from the beginning.

My goal in offering my web design services for Humboldt County businesses is to provide true value for the small business owner. Most of the web sites that I design are in the $800 to $1500 range. Customers that have their sites hosted on my server enjoy having their small updates performed in a timely manner, at no additional charge.

Not every client is going to be the perfect fit for every web designer in Humboldt County. Web designers all have their own strengths and weaknesses. If you come to me feeling that your site needs to be built in Flash, I’ll try to talk you out of it, but if it really makes sense for your business, I’ll refer you to someone better able to meet your needs.

If you are a small business owner in Humboldt Countly looking for a web designer, here are some of the most important reasons you should consider hiring me:

Value – I’m not the cheapest web designer out there, nor am I the most expensive. I’m not going to try competing with the kid fresh out of high school who knows how to use a template. I have won jobs though where the competition’s bid was 2-5 times higher than mine. Because of the way I run my business and the principles I use in my web sites, I am able to offer great affordability for a quality product.

Experience – I’ve been designing web sites in Humboldt County since 1996. I have clients throughout California and the rest of the United States.

Principles

• I believe in educating the customer. The web and the Internet (and computers in general) are filled with all kinds of jargon. I talk to my customers in plain english and I take the time to explain why I am doing something or not doing something.
• I keep it simple. It’s frustrating when things don’t work, and the more complex you make something, the less likely it is to be fail safe.

I’ve been doing a lot more PHP programming lately, especially integrating Word Press blogs (like this one). It’s been important to me that the blog part of the web site matches the look and feel of the rest of the site.

This means making sure that the style sheet for the main site lives peacefully with the style sheet for the blog. It also means that there are sections of the pages such as the menus that I want to keep in separate files and include them where needed. This makes it much easier to make global changes.

The way that PHP uses the path for includes is confusing, and rather than try to explain the rules, I’m going to show you what worked for me. I’m not enough of a programming geek to always want to know why, sometimes I just want it to work so I can get on with the project at hand.

Here’s a simplied directory structure of a typical site:

/
/index.php
/about-us.php
/blog/
/blog/myblog.php
/includes/
/includes/menu.php

Suppose we want to include menu.php in both /about-us.php and /blog/myblog.php. For /about-us.php it is easy:

include ("includes/menu.php");

But /myblog.php is a bit harder, since you can’t just use ../includes/menu.php like you would think. But this will work:

include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."/includes/menu.php");

Why am I writing a web design article about good sheets? After all, sheets, good or otherwise have very little to do with web design, in fact, I can’t really think of a connection. This article really isn’t about good sheets at all, it’s really about choosing effective search engine keywords. I recently saw an ad in our local newspaper where a web design firm was boasting about how they managed to get a customer ranked number 1 in Google for the keyword “good sheets”. My first reaction was, does anybody want “good sheets”? Maybe when people lay down at night they want the feel of fine bedding, or luxury linens, but is this country becoming so mediocre that we would settle for good sheets?

That’s what I set off to explore. First I looked at their major claim, that they ranked their client number 1 out of 27,000,000 sites. So I went to Google, typed in good sheets, and saw that Google actually listed 34,600,000 sites for good sheets. I have to admit though, that on the day that I looked, their client’s site did show up number one. I was impressed. Not only did Google find more sites in the days since the web designer did their search, but 34,600,000 sites just about good sheets. That’s a lot of sheet, good or otherwise. But wait, that number, 34 million, is the number of sites that Google found that had either word, “good” or “sheets” in the site. Now good is a pretty popular word, so it’s easy to see how there could be 34 million sites that mention the word good in them.

If you really want to see how many sites use the exact phrase “good sheets”, then you need to type it into Google’s search box in quotations, just like this: “good sheets”. Do that and you’ll find that they list around 18,000 web sites. Quite a bit fewer than 34 million, and still a large number. But are these sites all about good sheets as in bed linens? Reading the descriptions on Google’s site it appears that most of them are about good sheets. People writing tips about pleasing your girlfriend by buying her good sheets, making sure you wash the good sheets when you have guests, that sort of thing.

The real question though that I wondered, are people really searching for “good sheets”? For that I turned to the tool that most web masters turn to for keyword research, Wordtracker. This company gets compiled results of searches performed by millions of people at various search engines and provides a way to analyze not only how many times a keyword phrase is searched on, but also how many sites are competing for that term. It’s also eye opening to find out what other meanings your phrase may have. More on this later.

So I went to Wordtracker and started off by typing in good sheets. Their database returned five different search phrases that included both those words. Interestingly enough, none of the phrases were the exact phrase of “good sheets” I was looking for. So it was safe to say that nobody was searching for good sheets. The search phrases it returned were:

Looking at these search phrases, the first one mentions carlton sheets. Thinking it was a brand of sheets, I thought they must be pretty expensive if they offered no money down options to purchase them. But searching for them through Google, it became obvious that it was a misspelling of Carleton Sheets, who is a guy selling a real estate investment program.

The second and fifth entries were for people looking for sheet music for the song “Good Enough” by the band Evanescence. Definitely not people looking for bedding.

That leaves only the third and fourth entries as having anything to do with good sheets. Combined, these two search terms amounted to 5 searches. Really, only the people wondering how to tell good quality sheets would have been good prospects. But if you type in that exact search phrase into Google, you’ll find the results have nothing to do with good sheets as they relate to bedding.

That’s why it’s so important when doing keyword research to keep these three principal in mind:

• The keyword phase must be something that your customers are actually going to type into a search engines’ search box. It does absolutely no good to be ranked number 1 for a phrase nobody is searching on.
• The keyword phrase should not be too generic. Most keyword phrases these days need to be at least 2 words, and preferably 3. If your phrase is too generic you are going to have too many other companies competing for that phrase, and likely there are bigger and better financed companies that are going to be tough to overcome.
• The keyword phrase should relate to your business. It wouldn’t matter if millions of people were searching for “good sheets” if what they were really looking for was sheet music and not bedding.

Whether you’re going to do your own Search Engine Optimization or if you choose to have your web master do it for you, it’s important to do your research first. Otherwise you may find yourself without a bed to lie in.

Addendum: May 2008

I received this email from Bill Watch, who apparently knows how I can sell a lot more “good sheets”! I was tickled to be his “favorite” and I’m sure he’s going to do my wonders for my business since he understands it so well.

All kidding aside, this email is a great example of the type of company you want to run from. His recommendation includes using link farms, a definite Black Hat tactic that can hurt your rankings rather than improve them.


From: bill@rankingteam.com
Date: May 28, 2008 5:10:21 PM PDT
To: @aestheticdesign.com

Sincerely,
Bill Watch
(866) 867-3495

It’s important that your company has a website, but once you have one, you will find out there are lots of people out there who are ready to take advantage of you. This article covers some of the topics that you need to know in order to protect your investment in your website, as well as your company’s good name. The two biggest areas that I see customers getting into trouble from scams is Domain Name Registration, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Domain Name Registration

Having your own domain name (such as www.mycompany.com) should be part of your whole brand identity. You should make sure your domain is used on all of your marketing materials and any time you advertise. You should also be sure to use your email addresses from your domain rather than generic sites like Yahoo or AOL. Not only is using your own domain more professional, but you will always have it. Having and using your own domain allows you to switch hosting providers without any disruption to your communications.

Know your registrar

Domains require an annual renewal through companies called registrars. There used to be only one registrar, Network Solutions. But in the spirit of free commerce, the registration process was opened and now many companies are competing for the lucrative registration business. Unfortunately, many of them are unscrupulous and will try to trick you into renewing your domain with them, even though they aren’t your current registar. This is typically done by sending you an official looking letter, or email which makes it appear that they are your registrar. So many of these attempts are made that I’ve had some customers ignore their real renewal notices. So it’s very important that you know who your real registrar is. You can find out by doing a WHOIS on your domain. (http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp)

Contact Info

In addition to listing the current registrar, the WHOIS will also list who the registrant (owner) is. Make sure you are the owner of your domains and not your webmaster, your hosting company, or any other third party. Having anyone other than yourself as the owner of your domain gives that party too much leverage should that relationship deteriorate.

You should also make sure that all of the contact information is correct, especially the email address. Make sure it is an email address that you can still receive email from. Renewal notices go out via email, and domains have been lost because the email address wasn’t kept current. Most registrars will not attempt to contact you by phone or email if you fail to renew, although some will for an extra charge.

In addition to the Registrant, there are three other contacts that are attached to the domain, Billing, Administrative, and Technical. These may or may not all be the same, but I recommend that you make the Administrative Contact your webmaster. Renewal notices are typically sent to the Registrant and Administrative Contact email addresses so having your webmaster in the loop gives you added protection when your domain comes up for renewal. The Technical Contact is usually reserved for someone at your hosting company.

Renewal Period

Domains come up for annual renewal, but you can also renew for up to ten years. Some registrars can also set your domain to auto-renew, automatically charging your credit card. Just remember that if you renew your domain for ten years, you better make sure your credit card info and your contact info is kept current. I prefer to renew domains for two years. That way you save some of the headache of renewing every year, but it also keeps the renewal process in my mind.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Once you have a website, you will be contacted by Search Engine Optimization firms. I’m sorry to say, but this industry is starting to make lawyers look ethical. Some SEO firms will simply just take your money and do nothing, others can actually do more harm than good. So it’s important that if you feel you need to hire an SEO firm that you have some understanding of how this whole SEO business works.

First off it doesn’t work by submitting your site to over 500 search engines. That is your first clue to run. There aren’t 500 search engines that matter ( there are really three right now, Google, Bing, and an increasingly fading Yahoo) and the search engines prefer to find the sites they list on their own by following links from other sites. The second clue to run is if they mention metatags. Metatags are old history, search engines don’t use them much anymore. But many SEO firms seem to think they are the answer to all your problems. Just change the keywords in the metatags and resubmit. Sounds easy, but the problem is that it just doesn’t work.

Finally, there are no guarantees in the SEO world. No expert SEO can guarantee you the top ranking in the search engines for any meaningful keyword phrase unless they’re going to buy it. There are just too many variables out of their control. SEO’s that make that kind of promise usually pick keyword phrases like the name of your company (usually not too hard unless it’s real generic) or something so obscure that nobody’s bound to search on it any way. (See my article on Good Sheets for more on that topic.)

Natural Rankings vs. Paid

Most search engines these days offer paid ads in addition to their search engine results (natural rankings). So if your site isn’t doing well in the natural rankings you can always buy your way to the top. But isn’t it better to get good results for free rather than have to pay for them? Sure it is, and here’s how.

Obtaining good natural rankings

Unless you’re going to pay your way to the top there are four things to consider when planning your site or making changes to it in the hopes of improving your search engine rankings, Keywords, Titles, Content, and Links.

Keywords – Hopefully, before your webmaster even started building your site you had a discussion about keywords. Keywords are what your targeted customers are going to type in at a search engine in order to solve their problem, whether that is to find a bed and breakfast inn in their next vacation destination, or to find a local plumber to fix their over flowing toilet. It is important to choose keywords that are specific enough to make sense for your business, but still general enough that people are actually searching for it. Rarely is your main keyword the name of your business. Your webmaster should be able to help you research the right keywords.

Titles – Do a search at Google or any other search engine, and you’ll see that the search term you typed in most likely appears in the title of the pages returned. That’s because the title of the page is one of the best places to put your keywords. So your home page should not be titled “Home Page”. Instead it should use 2-3 of your most important keyword phrases. However, not only is the title field limited, but the more words in the title tends to diminish the importance of all the others.

Content – The pages listed at the top of your search engine results are also likely to have the keyword phrase you entered used through out the text. Pages that have the keyword phrase with the words in the exact order entered will usually rank above other pages that have the same words but in a different order. For example “Ferndale Lodging” returns different results than “Lodging Ferndale”.

So if you have lots of keywords that you want to rank highly for, guess what, you need to have lots of pages in your website so that you can concentrate on only one or two main phrases on each page. Search engines want to direct their customers to good content. That means actual text and not just pretty pictures or whiz-bang animation. It also means you need to have a skillful copywriter who can weave your keywords into your text and have it read intelligently. Don’t think you can get away with just listing all your keywords at the bottom either. Having lots of well written content will improve your search engine rankings and your site traffic more than all the tricks that unscrupulous SEO’s use.

Links (and link exchanges) -A website is an island in a sea of information. You need to help build bridges so people can find their way to your island. One way is to do well in search engine rankings. Another is to build the quantity of quality links from other sites to your site. Let me stress quality links. This doesn’t mean you reply to every email you get requesting reciprocal links. People are going overboard on this whole link exchange thing. When looking at sites to exchange links with, ask yourself these questions:

• Is the other site somehow related in content to mine? Are we likely to share the same customers? You don’t want to trade links with a competitor, but you should have some kind of symbiotic relationship between the two sites.
• Is it a quality site? Remember when you trade links you’re making a recommendation to your site’s visitors. Send them to a poorly designed site, or a shady business, and it could reflect on your business.
• Is the other site going to link back to you? Is their links page easy to find from their home page? Many sites that I get link requests from have huge link farms built into their site but you can’t get to them from their home page. Which means you’ll be sending them traffic but they won’t be sending any back your way.
• Does the request to add a reciprocal link sound like a form letter? Best avoid it, they’re probably link farming.

Google’s Guidelines

Google and other search engines would like everyone to play fairly. Google has even spelled out what they consider the rules to be on their website. You and your webmaster should read the entire page and understand it, but here are the rules in a nutshell. Breaking any of these guidelines could get your website bounced out of the search engines’ databases completely, a risk not worth taking.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Along with knowing what makes a web site good, it is also important to avoid the mistakes that can ruin a small business web site.

1. Sites designed with Front Page – This program has allowed just about anybody to be a webmaster, and while that is a noble cause, the implementation of it is very flawed. Front Page creates the most bloated code of any program I’ve seen, and it is so Microsoft dependent, that sites built with it often don’t work when used with browsers other than Internet Explorer. Fortunately, Microsoft realized the error of their ways and discontinued the program.
2. Flash – I’ve seen very few instances where I thought having Flash on a web site added to the appeal of the site, and they were all entertainment sites. For business web sites, I guess I’m just more of a substance kind of guy. Usually when I go to a web site it is because I’m looking for information. I don’t need to be entertained with animations that take forever to download and play. Flash not only requires a plug-in, it seems like you never have the latest version. Worse than the Flash intro (which thankfully can usually be skipped) is when the whole site is navigated by Flash. Often buggy to the point it doesn’t work at all, most implementations of Flash navigation are not very intuitive. I’m not going to spend much time trying to figure out how to navigate a site. I’ve seen several sites where they just have some weird non-intuitive symbols and you have to roll over each one of them to see what they go to. Flash also hurts your search engine rankings because there isn’t any text to index on a Flash page. So where do most people put their Flash animation. Yep, right on the home page, the most important piece of real estate when it comes to search engine indexing. Need a second opinion?
3. Music – I have over 400 music CDs burned onto my hard drive so that I can listen to my favorite music whenever I want. The music is played through a set of nice speakers. It does not need to be accompanied by some cheap MIDI interpretation of Muzak. Music also takes extra time to download. Also since a lot of non-business related web surfing goes on during business hours, the person planning their next vacation while the boss isn’t looking isn’t going to appreciate your music giving him away.
4. Frames – Frames were a good idea, unfortunately the way they were implemented in HTML was very poor. Frames make it hard to navigate, bookmark, and print web pages. Search engines are getting better at indexing them, but due to their design, it’s hard to get the user to the right complete frameset.
5. Browser or page size requirements – Best viewed on IE or best viewed at 1024×768? What a nice way to make me feel left out if that’s not what I have.
6. Tiny font sizes – Usually a result of designers using Style Sheets and not checking their work on Macs. If I was granted three web design wishes by a magical genie, the first would be have PC’s and Mac’s display fonts equally. 9 point on a PC looks a lot larger than 9 point on a Mac. People designing sites on PC’s often use legalese sized fonts that display so small on a Mac that they can’t even be rendered well enough to read. It’s not a question of having good eyesight, but there simply isn’t enough detail to make out what the letters are. It’s further complicated by the fact that Internet Explorer’s default font size is 16pt, which for most people is too big. So designer’s make the fonts smaller and if the user has already chosen a smaller font, it can get really hard to read. I prefer to use the default font size for the body text, and let the user change it if they need to.