Unintentionally Blank

It’s all very well following my tips on keeping a blog or website valid, but checking that you are doing it right can be a pain. The W3C’s HTML Validator is the best way to check, but there must be something easier and quicker.

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Making your blog look good and work well is a major consideration of anyone who wants to do well in the blogosphere. Making sure your blog is valid and adheres to the standards of the W3C will ensure that your theme will look good in all browsers, even those yet to be released, be more accessible, easier to maintain and easier for search engines to crawl. So how do you go about making sure your site sticks within the guidelines?

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Transparency can add something beautiful to a design. Randa Clay thought so whilst designing her first WordPress theme and I have been considering something very similar for a design that has been going round in my head recently. Randa’s problem was that making the background of a <div> transparent so that the page background could be seen through it caused everything within the <div> to be transparent to the same degree, including text and images.

Transparent post level images aren’t desirable, so I set about finding out how best to apply the transparency to the <div>. Here are my results:

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I was going to write a post on how using semantically correct markup for your post titles would improve the accessibility of your page, impress the meaning of your content to both readers and search engines and generally add to the level of well-being in the world. Sadly for me, Chris Pearson got there first with his post, The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs. The other unfortunate thing is that he probably did it better than I would have done!

Flattery aside, the article really does hit the spot. Header elements are not to be used for presentation and selecting the size of font you use for a particular word, they convey the hierarchy and meaning behind each heading and subheading and should be used like that. Recently I changed my post titles on their single pages from <h2>s to <h1>s as I realised that the title of my post is the most important part of the page, not the name of my blog. I do have my own tip as well, so I wrote this post instead.

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