Note: If you are viewing this page through a different browser (i.e. AOL, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Opera), please close it out and reopen through Internet Explorer or all features of this application will not work.

Also, recently, I was required to complete an online orientation course for a college where I currently teach. (I will not mention the college name here, although you could probably figure it out if you view my resume.) I attempted to access the course with Mozilla Firefox, my usual browser. No good. Next, I tried Opera. No good either. By now, I was irritated. I tried both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome out of spite. As expected, their website failed again. Finally, I turned to Internet Explorer and was able to access the course. Later, I found the system requirements page for their website, and Internet Explorer is listed as a requirement.

Now the scary part: This college offers an associate degree program in Web Development!

This aggravates me. Not everybody uses Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Depending on who you ask, anywhere from 50% to 80% of people browse the web with Internet Explorer. Or, alternately, 20% to 50% of people use a different browser; this is a significant number of people.

I’ve seen this before. Do you remember the old “Best viewed with Netscape” and “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” buttons that commonly appeared on most websites a decade ago? It was a nightmare. Half of the websites did not work properly with your preferred browser. I thought we were past these “browser wars”.

This is why we have web standards.

One of the major issues on the web is making sites available to all people, whatever their hardware and software. Presently, all modern web browsers possess decent support for web standards. Is it not reasonable to expect web sites and applications to conform to these standards?

There is no good excuse to not adopt web standards in your web development work. At the very least, you should check that your web sites and applications work properly in the five major browsers: IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

But, now, how will people find it? Usually through one of the internet’s search engines.

You can wait for the search engines to find your site, but that may take a long while. Or, it might never happen, especially if no other sites listed in the search engine link to your site.

If you are impatient, you can easily present your web site for inclusion by manually submitting the site to the search engines.

There are four major search engines you should know:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Bing (a.k.a. Microsoft Search, Live Search, MSN Search)
4. Ask.com

Three of them (Google, Yahoo, & Bing) allow webmasters to create an account where they can control some information available on the search engines.

All four accept the submission of Sitemap files.  A sitemap is an XML file listing of all URLs for a site, along with some additional information about each page.  Visit http://www.sitemaps.org for more information.  Go to  http://mikedaub.com/sitemap.xml on my site to view an example.

If you would like to exclude files or directories of your web site from the search engines, they (probably) follow the robots exclusion standard. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org for more information.  Go to http://mikedaub.com/robots.txt on my site to view an example.

Google

Google Webmaster tools (and to submit sitemap)
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
You may need a Google/Gmail account to register

To submit website to Google, go to:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo

Yahoo Site Explorer (Webmaster Tools)
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
You may need a Yahoo account to register

To submit both websites and sitemaps, go to:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Bing

Bing Webmaster tools
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
You may need a Windows Live (Hotmail, MSN, .NET Passport) account to access the webmaster tools.

To submit your site to Bing, go to:
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

To submit your sitemap to Bing, go to:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

(replacing www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml with the actual sitemap address, of course.)

Ask.com

No webmaster tools.

No means of submitting single web pages.

To submit sitemap, go to:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

(replacing the web address as above)