How do you write your code so that it shows up on all or most browsers way you want it to look? By understanding which browsers support which tags, and using a validation service to check your code.

There are different tags that sometimes do same thing. The problem here, is that some browers read some tags and not others. If browser can't read your tags, it will cause your page to appear in some way other than what you intended. The trick is to write your code in such a way that all, or at least most browsers can read and display it way it is supposed to be.

You will find an HTML Tag List at: http://www.ncdesign.org/html/list.htm You can use this as you are writing your code and avoid some pitfalls. It only covers Netscape and Internet Explorer. These are most used browsers, and probably includes about 80 percent or more of online crowd.

(c) Copyright 2002, Daniel Bazac

Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.

When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb?

After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think main reasons for dot-coms failure are:

* Poor business plan. In last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned companies that clearly couldn't reach profitability.

* Poor company promotion. This applies both offline and online. Two newspaper ads and word of mouth are not enough.

* Poor financial management. Fancy offices, free food, does it ring a bell?

* Poor Human Resources management. With lots of cash in their hands, many start-up companies hired too many people or, even worse, hired unqualified staff. The hiring of friends and relatives often returned no value on investments.

* Errors in company's Web site. Sometimes hundreds of errors could be found in one Web page. Yes, those Web site builders should go back to school- if they ever went to school for HTML at all.

I'll focus my comments on last reason:

How Errors in Web Site Can Affect Company's Health -------------------------------------------------------------------

It's clear that you can make money on Web if you have customers. You have customers if you have viewers- "traffic" in geek's language. And you get traffic if your site is easy to find -- near top -- in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That's not so easy to achieve.

First of all your site has to be indexed by search tools: Search Engines and Web Directories.

Although some Search Engines will eventually find your site by themselves, most of time this only happens if somebody links to your site. In case of a NEW site, having existing links is almost impossible. Rather than wait for links to be made, start a submission campaign.

A big no-no is submitting a Web site using submission software. Using software of this type may be quick and easy, but some Web Directories and Search Engines do NOT accept automated submissions.

It's true that manual submission is a time consuming process -- you'll have to read AND follow each Search Engines' submission guidelines, to effectively perform submission – but it's a necessary step.

Most of defunct sites I've checked had only a modest presence and visibility in Search Engines.

Let's say that you submitted your site correctly, you waited a reasonable amount of time - usually few weeks – for Search Engines to process your submission, but your site does not appear near top in Search Engine Results Pages.

You're wondering why, right? Well, one or more of following reasons might apply:

1) Your submission was not accepted by Search Engines. If you used spamming techniques, such as:

* Repeating keywords in keyword meta tag or using text in same color as background, some Search Engines might refuse to index your site.

* Page redirection -- including cloaking -- or building artificial links farms can sometimes be seen as spam by some Search Engines. These links farms involve building Web pages for sole purpose of creating links to targeted site. For more about spam please read my article:

"Search Engine Spamming Sucks!" [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html ]

Some Search Engines also have difficulty in indexing pages that use frames or Flash. 2) Your submission was accepted, but your site is not listed in Top 10-30. Because very few people check pages after first 30 results, you want to be in Top 10-30. There are many reasons why a site is not listed high.

The most common reasons are:

* The lack of your main keywords in content of page, in Title tag and in Description and Keyword meta tags. Ultimately it all depends of Search Engines’ algorithm- criteria used by Search Engines to rank pages.

* HTML errors. Examples include unclosed tags, unquoted attributes, improperly nested tags, missing ALT attribute on images. Any of these will affect your site's accessibility, reducing your potential client pool.