During the phases of development and maintenance of your website, “testing” plays a critical role, especially when you have a limited budget & in-house staff. There are chances that users may try to guess the urls of content in protected areas of your site and may try to download it or the restricted content Urls may appear within the referrer logs and people might share it without your knowledge.

It is often important to look for an ultimate security test by hacking your site yourself. This will give you the utmost experience about the security of your site. Use the most popular hacking tools that you guess a hacker could use for testing just to verify how protected your protected areas are. You are under a wrong impression if you think that the security of your websites is always good. You should test it regularly to make sure about its secure. To safeguard confidential data and customer information is critical to gain the trust of your visitors.

Static websites use what is considered the first generation of web development technology which includes the HTML. A lot of webmasters think that the use of HTML makes it difficult to update web pages, and would actually require them to properly sort out these codes and commands. It is very complicated to handle the web pages and corresponding updates. In redesigning your website, you would also encounter more difficulty in static websites since the style is mixed with the content.

But they believe and say so because they are now used to more advanced and modern web development tools and they think HTML is outdated.
Dynamic websites, on the other hand, use a database for storage of information. This allows programming languages such as ASP and PHP to be used and be translated to HTML. Then the browser can understand the page. You can use these options to simplify your website developing, rather than going through HTML.

Dynamic websites also allow a user-friendly content management. The users can easily edit the texts and images displayed on the website as often as they like. They can maximize their sense of control on all their web pages. This also ensures that someone who is not too web design and development savvy does not have to rely on a programmer simply to understand complicated commands.

Once a user updates a particular page, dynamic websites have menu systems that automatically update as pages are either added or removed. In static websites, once you update a page, you must edit the entire site.

Small sites may be better off with static websites since they are not updated very much but if these sites are subject to expansions, a dynamic site may be worth the added cost.

Users find dynamic websites easier to handle since they can continuously update styles without having to touch on the content. Databases are also searchable with the use of just keywords.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where the World Wide Web standards are developed. These standards and protocols have been established to ensure long-term growth for the web and to maintain a certain level of conformity throughout the web design and development community.

This has been a clear debate within the web development industry with regards to the use of standards that W3C imposes and the limitations that it presents on the designers, developers and users. A lot of people have opted to ignore the standards altogether. In most cases the best that can be done is to always take W3C compliance into account in both the design and development process to either fully eliminate or at least minimize the errors of a website. However by trying to work towards minimizing errors and W3C validation, you may need to sacrifice certain functions or design aspects or even to risk having some visitors unable to view your web site properly.

Benefits to compliant websites

If your web site is W3C compliant, the “W3C Compliant” badge may be displayed on any page that validates. Displaying the W3C compliant badge also shows your customers that careful consideration has been applied to W3C standards when developing your web site. Some people may view this as an indication of how you do business.

Limitations

Having W3C compliance takes away backwards compatibility with some browsers such as, Netscape 4.X and Mozilla Firefox.

Depending on browser settings some of your customers may have difficulty viewing certain functions of your site. Often you will find that W3C compliant web sites pose limitations towards certain browsers. This includes issues with flash banners. Although this can be overcome by manipulating code programming, but you need to be aware of the limitations surrounding this.

If you insist on W3C compliance then the creation of a web site should be done using current data relating to the usage of browsers to ensure that your web site is compatible with the most popular and most used browser.

Mandatory Checks for a newly created website.

Is the site’s content unique and original - The content should be original and not duplicated from some other source. Also important is to check for spelling and grammatical errors in the content.

Is the design consistent - All the pages of the site should follow some basic pattern or format and look similar.

Is the site easy to navigate - The navigation should be simple and easy to access. Visitors should be able to move effortlessly on to the other pages.

Do the website’s pages load fast - Pages should load fast, most visitors don’t have patience to wait endlessly for a page to load. They would quickly move on to another website if the pages don’t load fast enough.

Did you view your pages with popular browsers, platforms (PC and Mac), screen resolutions, and settings - It’s important that your site is cross browser compatible as not all people use the same browser. The site should look the same in all major browsers.

Have you provided correct contact information on the ‘contact us’ page - It is necessary to check whether the information provided on the ‘contact us’ page is correct and up-to date.

Check all internal and external links are valid - Also check if there are any broken links on the site.

Web standards are basically the use of correct web coding standards as laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Web Standards are a set of strategies and tools to build web sites that do what it is set out to do, be it a hobby site, a business site or a paid site on contract. The web standards which are of most concern to modern business are XHTML and CSS coding practices.

Web standards compliant pages get a greater visibility in web searches. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easier for the search engines to access and evaluate the information present in those documents, and helps in accurate indexing. The use of web standards makes it easier for server-side as well as client-side software to understand the structure of your document.

Compliant code gives the opportunity of validating a page with a validation service. Validators process the documents and return you with a list of errors which makes correcting errors a lot easier, and saves a lot of time.

Accessibility is an important idea behind many web standards, especially HTML. Standards-compliant websites allow the web to be used by people with disabilities. Making your sites standards-compliant ensures that not only traditional browsers, old and new, will all be able to present sites properly, but they will work with all unusual browsers and media.

Writing web pages in accordance with the standards shortens site development time and makes the pages easier to maintain. Debugging and troubleshooting become easier, because the code follows a standard. But there is a downside to all this, it can be difficult to find a designer who will make an attractive site which is also web standards compliant. The designers need to be made aware of the benefits of using web standards, the clients need to be educated too as one of the reasons why a lot of very talented web designers do not create sites which are web standards compliant is due to the time involved and the lack of appreciation received from the client for doing so.

Most important components of a Good website

*Unique and up to date Content is always good
*Pleasant color scheme and Graphics that make a site visually appealing.
*Consistent layout that segments the content well and visitors get what they want easily.
*Simple and easy access Navigation. Visitors should be able to effortlessly move around a website,
*Short and Memorable URL (you can also use mod rewrite)
*Clear aim
*Faster page loads
*Compatibility with all popular browsers
*A reason for the visitors to come back

And the list could go on forever. Overall I think the site should have marketability and motivational factors for your visitors as to make them feel confortable while browsing as well as know your product or service well.

A clean layout, good design, unique and updated content all are important - but what’s the use of all these if nobody’s coming on your website and reading it. So apart from all the above mentioned points, a site needs strong marketing strategy to achieve success.