Thursday 12 May 2011

How To Optimize a Web Page for WebTV

You just created your website and made sure that it looks excellent on commonly used browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome and then you suddenly found out that some of your visitors use WebTV to browse through your page. To your disappointment, your hard work in making sure that your website looks excellent on regular computer browsers does not exactly come out well when one uses WebTV. You can still optimize your webpage to display correctly on a WebTV browser. The following are some recommendations that you can follow.

1. Modify the width of your webpages’ body.
Because WebTV uses a television to render your website, and not a computer monitor, it has a resolution restriction. Specifically speaking, it can only render your webpage at 544 pixels in width, so you need to make certain that the width does not go over the suggested pixels in width.

2. Change the font tags to Helvetica.
WebTV browser will only support Helvetica as its font so font tags specifically requesting to use a different font, like Georgia or Verdana, will not be entertained. Create your webpage with the intention of only using Helvetica as the font face.

3. Make the sizes of the font slightly larger than you normally would set them.
As reading webpages with only a font size of only 12 in across the room through a television set will certainly be hard for most people, WebTV defaults the font size to 18 and there are no workarounds to change this setting. So you, as a webmaster, will need to change the font sizes to at least a minimum of 18 in order for the text to be readable over a television set.

4. Build your website as simple as you could possibly can.
There are some webpage elements that would usually show excellently on a PC browser but do not render correctly, or sometimes, not rendered at all when you view it on WebTV. So if you will take into account the visitors using WebTV browser, you need to make your design as simple as possible; this basically means that you should not be using bright or light colors as the background color or text colors. WebTV does not support Java, so make sure you don’t use it for any important elements on your web page.

Get your hands on the software called “WebTV viewer”. The WebTV viewer is a very effective tool that allows you to view how your website looks like when viewed using a WebTV and you can grab the copy of the software at http://developer.msntv.com/Tools/MSNTVVwr.asp. Install the software and see how your webpage would appear on a WebTV browser without having the need to purchase a WebTV box. That will allow you to find any problems and fix them so they work better on WebTV. Now your WebTV visitors can access your web page just fine, and that means they’ll keep coming back for more!

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