Web Design

Improving your SEO / Semantic code...

I haven’t wrote about Web Design in quite sometime, I thought starting with something on the much neglected subject of the Semantic Web.

Personified’s The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs brings up some interesting points around tailoring your code for blogs. It certainly makes sense to use the structure to highlight the important aspects of your site and in turn improve your SEO.

The main one I want to point out is the use of the < h1 > tag. Personified thinks that you should use this tag for for your article titles and your logo/site name should be wrapped in something like a < span > or < div >. The premise being it’s the most important thing on the site, it references the content in more ways than your blog name would.

I’ve bought into this one, but practically it means tailoring your CMS or templating system to serve just one H1 tag on a page. It’s easy for the individual article pages and when you think of templates for each page it starts to sound a little easier. If you really think of what is important on the each page then on your main page it might be the newest article, but this might revert back to the site name with < h2 > tags for the article titles.

I guess it’s just how much of a Semantic Web purist you want to be or if you actually want people to read your articles? I know which I’ll be plugging for.

Developing for the mobile web

Does a blog really need to be developed for the mobile web? (not the WAP network) A lot of phones have RSS feeders and unless the content is purely text then it’s a little pointless.

I still need to set-up a print spreadsheet, but I might do a mobile version too. Although it’s probably easier to create a different section in textpattern (/mobile), create a template and import the relevant content in.

Luckily I have started web design in the good old 56k modem days, so as a rule I tend to build very lean and fast loading sites. Hopefully this will carry over to the mobile web…

Design in progress

If you’ve come to this site before you’ll probably see that it’s changed a lot since it was setup. It’s been a portfolio site, a touting for work site and now it’s back to being a blog.

I’m concentrating on getting the layout perfect for my current needs and all the background code right before I move on to the design. This was I’ll have a clear framework to start with. Also I want to get the content right and not just have it trickling in. My wife will also do some writing for it, and she’s much better at it than I am.

I’ve set this up in Textpattern, I could have used one of the newer CMS’s but I’m sticking with the one I know because I haven’t been doing Web Design for a long while and didn’t want to spend time learning a new one. However I’m adopting a progressive enhancement approach as I still want this site to be as accessible as it can be without huge amounts of effort.

Hope you like the improvements when they come.