Following on from the RNIB’s web accessibility initiatives, web compliance experts Magus Ltd and The British Standards Institute are working together to create a new publically accessible standard (PAS 124) for websites. Web standards govern the effectiveness, function and appearance of a website, and include: brand, legal, accessibility, search engine optimisation (SEO), usability and technical standards.

Websites are increasingly the key communication vehicle for a company, its brand and products. Despite this, research from Magus shows that many of the world’s leading organisations don’t have formal brand and technical standards defined to govern their websites. Even those that do are failing to effectively implement or enforce them, achieving full compliance with less than 20% of their own web standards. The websites of these organisations significantly under-perform or damage the brand as a result.

PAS 124 will help to protect the significant investment organisations are making in their web presence and online brands, by establishing best practice for “defining, implementing and managing organisational web standards”. It will provide a clear framework to help organisations apply standards effectively to significantly improve online performance and protect the integrity of their brands.

More detail can be found on the BSI’s press release.

Apache is controlled by a series of configuration files but the one we will be dealing with here is httpd.conf. This file contains instructions on how Apache should run. Several companies offer GUI-based Apache front-ends, but it’s easier to edit the configuration files by hand.

Remember to make back-up copies of all your Apache configuration files, in case one of the changes you make while experimenting renders the Web server inoperable.

Also, remember that configuration changes you make don’t take effect until you restart Apache.

Configure the httpd.conf File:

The httpd.conf file can be found in the conf directory in your Apache installation. In my case, this is the following location:

C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf

1. To include the correct default or index file, you need to find the following code and make sure that your default file name is included (see screenshot).

<IfModule>
DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html
</IfModule>

For ColdFusion and PHP you would also need to include their equivalents, i.e. index.cfm and index.php.

2. Set up a virtual host definition:

<virtualhost>
DocumentRoot c:\WebRoot
ServerName localhost
<directory>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</directory>
</virtualhost>

Make sure that the directory permissions are set otherwise a directory forbidden message (such as below) will be displayed.

3. Restart the Apache service. You should then be able to browse to your local website.

4. If you’re doing something cunning like setting up an alias for the local site, e.g. http://whatley.local/ rather than the usual http://localhost/whatley/ then you may need to edit your hosts file e.g.:

In my case, the hosts file is found in the following location: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. You can simply edit this file in notepad, much like with httpd.conf.

And that is all there is to it.

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