Top 7 Nepali websites out of standards

I have nothing against the websites listed below but just want to remind about the situation of web design and web development of the Nepali sites that have most traffic from Nepal. Recently I've visiting Alexa.com for many things, due to curiosity I looked into top 100 sites in Nepal (added recently). I was not surprised to see Nepalnews.com at no. 11 in Nepal equating to the no. 1 among Nepali sites. It is no.1 Nepali site in where as the no. 1 in Nepal is Yahoo which is no.1 in the world itself. Similarly it goes for the other sites listed below.

The websites include News sites, entertainment sites, NTC's site may be due to the not working new web-sms and Worldlink's site. The websites in order as per Alexa's Rankings in Nepal:

*No screen-shots, place your mouse pointer over links to get the screen-shots via Snap.

The rankings are given below and Alexa informs most of the traffic are from Nepal for most of the sites below.

* Source Alexa.com as of 14th October 2008, link here.

Leaving all these behind lets look at the front-end (code) aspects of theses sites. Without doubts XHTML/CSS design has taken over the old table design, are some reasons to use XHTML/CSS designs. But I regret telling that none of the top 7 sites use XHTML/CSS design they still follow the almost obsolete table design. I don't believe all things should be XHTML/CSS there are elements like forms etc that needs table but for the layout of the website XHTML/CSS is the new standard now.

Not only that they do not use any standard HTML tags, like the headlines or titles of the post are not even headlines like H1, H2 etc. Let's take a simple test, put a news or post anything from the sites below and post it to Facebook. The Facebook parser does not parse the title of the post/article/news, why because the web design standard is not up to the mark. Then try it from a blog or any popular site and look at the results the exact title and body will come in place while sharing the link or the post.

Most sites have a fixed design not changed for a long time and targeted at 800x600 resolution ex Nepalnews.com. I assume almost none of the above sites use a Content Management System (CMS) or any other Framework. I don't know if the so called top sites have any thing to do with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but they have OK page rank.

It all boils down to a fact what does this portray about the design capability of Nepali web designers and web developers. If the top 7 sites have non standard and loads of errors to offer what do we expect from other sites. I hope all developers of the above sites come to know there are many tools, Content Management Systems (CMSs), Frameworks forJavascirpt, CSS etc etc which they can use to improve their design and even code at the back-end.

Hope we will get to visit better standard compliant Nepali websites in near future.

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