Unfortunately, there some inept web site designers lurking about. Let me tell you what my client Full Circle Recycle went through when he hired a "web site designer." You can go to the new Full Circle Recycle website by clicking on this URL www.fullcirclerecycle.com. It is a pretty simple site but you should have seen it before we cleaned it up.
The first obstacle was getting the designer to do the website. It took almost six months for the website to be finished and up on the internet. When my client viewed it on the web, the background was a horrible shade of lime green, the text was hard to read, all the links on the website did not work. The links just came back to the Home Page. You could not get to any of the other pages. There were numerous spelling errors, information errors, and the overall esthetics of the web site really sucked.
The problems were very simple to fix and you would assume the designer would get on the job quickly and fix everything. Well, when the Full Circle Recycle client finally came to me, the website had been up in this terrible state for TWO YEARS. The client had been trying to get it fixed all that time with no results and here is the worst part, he paid $300.00 for this trash and could not get his money back.
I was hired to fix the problems and it did take a little while to figure out the bad coding and procedures used to build this site. Most of the coding was not even necessary and contributed to many of the problems. Four hours later, the site was up and running like a Swiss watch and Full Circle Recycle had a website that actually did what it was supposed to.
The moral of the story is check out some of the websites the potential designer has completed and talk to their clients. Do not pay the full fee until you are satisfied with the product. Best of all, come to Jolleysites Web Construction for your web needs.
I started getting up to speed on HTML 5 about six months ago. If you already know HTML4, etc. it is not very difficult to understand and use HTML5. My viewpoint is it will be at least a year before the majority of programmers switch to strictly HTML 5. Internet Explorer 8 does not even support HTML5 markup code. The problem here is IE9 does support HTML 5, and you cannot use IE 9 except on Windows 7. Can you see the problem? Microsoft is forcing people to switch to Windows 7 if you want to see HTML 5 pages.
Mozilla Firefox supports all the HTML flavors as does Google Chrome, Opera and the rest. The latest version of Firefox works on MS XP, Vista, and Windows 7. If you do not want to spend the money to get Windows 7 (some computers will not even load Windows 7) and the upgrade to Windows 7 from XP or Vista is a nightmare, stick with HTML4. You will be good to go for many years. XP and Vista are still alive.