Separate your content from its presentation. It is a best practice to keep the code on your website that controls of the appearance of your site separate from the actual content. It’s good for accessibility and it’s good for flexibility, in case you want to go back and change stuff on your site later. I recently read an article by Aaron Gustafson on A List Apart, Understanding Progressive Enhancement, that reinforced this concept from a bit of a different angle.

“Progressive enhancement” dates back to 2003. This article starts with contrasting progressive enhancement with graceful degradation. Whereas graceful degradation focuses on giving the latest browsers the best experience while not completely breaking the experience for older browsers, progressive enhancement takes the opposite perspective: starting with a good experience and making it better depending on what technology you’re using. This is the angle the interesting angle. It’s not just about making sure that a website works for everyone. A highly interactive site can engage users and may increase conversion rates, and progressive enhancement takes the content as the foundation on which you can build a great website.

The heart of progressive enhancement is the content – writing content that is properly marked up so it is versatile and can be displayed in all sorts of different technologies. Gustafson uses the analogy of a peanut M&M to discuss this – the content is the peanut, the chocolate is presentation (CSS), and the hard candy shell is the flashy, snappy interactive features that use the best that browsers have to offer. Although almond M&M’s are obviously superior to the peanut variety, this is a good analogy.

This approach makes sense. Foremost, if people can’t access your content, why bother having a website? Solid and versatile content is good for people who have disabilities. There’s always going to be plenty of users who do not have the very latest browser – plus, you never know who’s going to come out with a brand new browser next. Browsers may not even be the main way customers interact with your content, one day.

This progressive enhancement concept plays well with SEO. You’ve got to ensure that search engines can figure out what your site is all about, so making your content adaptable is going to help. From a user experience perspective, also, this stuff matters. You don’t want to go around cutting off potential customers from reading your site just because they’re on a mobile device or are paranoid about having Javascript turned on.

Lately we have received a few questions at Pure Visibility about whether or not a company should buy multiple domain names/extensions and how many variations of their company name is enough. Unfortunately, there is not one simple answer to this question and it really depends on the company. Most of the time we do recommend to buy not only your company URL, but to get common misspellings and alternative names that a potential customer might use to find your company. As far as purchasing multiple extensions such as the .org, .net and .mobi we typically don’t recommend doing so unless you have a good reason for it. A good example of a company purchasing multiple domain extensions is USAJobs whose main domain extension is .gov They also purchased usajobs.com; clearly they learned from the whitehouse.com vs. whitehouse.gov debacle.

I recently talked to a client who was informed that a competitor was interested in buying their company name with the .net extension. The law can be a little unclear about whether you can buy any url if it has a trademarked name in it, so, the client was considering just buying the other extension to avoid legal headaches (see avoiding copyright infringment on your domain name for more details.) I concurred that it was logical to buy the .net to avoid headaches, but also told them to rest assured that they don’t have to purchase every extension out there.

The important next step is to not make a duplicate site at the .net address, rather, set up a 301 redirect. If you simply make a clone of your site you will risk being marked as spam by Google and getting de-indexed. How to redirect parked domains.

I also had a client contact us about the .mobi extension in particular. They were informed that .mobi was the up and coming URL for mobile devices and thought it would be a good idea to buy this extension before a competitor could beat them to it. We decided that for them it would be a better idea not to buy the .mobi extension because, if they wanted their site to be visible on a cell phone browser they could edit their current site design to be mobile friendly (make your site mobile friendly.) I believe that you don’t need to purchase the .mobi extension until it becomes more popular, currently someone using a mobile browser would typically type in .com because it is the most familiar but this could change in the future.

The rule of thumb I use when buying domain extensions is make sure I have the .com and if I have a compelling reason to purchase additional extensions then I do it. If there is reason to believe a competitor might purchase my url with a different extension then I spend the small amount of money ($5.00-$30.00/year) it takes to buy the additional domains

Blue Beanie Mark, originally uploaded by Own Page One.

A warm fuzzy way to raise awareness for Web Standards and Accessibility. Monday, November 26, 2007 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content. … Don a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 26, switch your profile picture in Facebook and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr.