Craig Soup Web Design Blog

CraigSoup.com has undergone another mild redesign. I’ve brought it together to make it a little more visually cohesive, and I really like the results. As you can see, I haven’t redesigned the blog just yet, but that shouldn’t be long in coming.

I got the fancy, dark blue background above the header from the ‘Patterns’ section of Brusheezy.com. Thanks to Shawn Rubel for the awesome design!

The new design was created with XHTML and CSS, and the graphics were created in Photoshop.

Anyways, please leave a comment, and let me know what you think of the new web design.

Update: The design, as you can clearly see, has now been applied to the blog. Ah, the beauty of uniformity!

Sorry for the overly alliterative title . . . sometimes I can’t help myself!

As a web designer, I feel it highly important to adhere as closely as possible to Web Standards. Doing this ensures that the sites I design will be visible to as many people as possible, across as many platforms and browsers as possible, on as many devices as possible.

But thanks to an article that Nate Whitehill pointed out, I recently discovered that using Web Standards is also very important for Search Engine Optimization.

Don’t get me wrong, valid code in and of itself won’t really help your organic search results all that much, but NOT having valid code could very possibly cause search engine crawlers to skip over some of your website’s important information, thus affecting your search engine rankings.

Also, if invalid code causes your website to be displayed incorrectly on certain browsers, then you may be losing a significant amount of traffic due to people leaving your site because it doesn’t look right. This alone could kill every bit of SEO work you’ve already done.

So that’s just one more reason I’m committed to creating fully standards-compliant code. After all, you wouldn’t want to miss out on some potentially search-engine-rich material just because your web designer was too lazy to validate his code, would you?

Does the phrase “semantic HTML” mean anything to you?

If you’re a web developer, then you’re probably familiar with the concept, if not the name. Semantic HTML refers to clean HTML code that’s free of any type of presentational markup. That means no more table tags for layout purposes and no more empty gif files that serve as spacers. You’ve heard of separating content and design with the use of HTML and CSS, and the concept of semantic HTML is a key component of this separation.

The main idea of semantic HTML is to create simpler, cleaner code . . . so why use such a bulky name to describe it? Well, recently someone else asked the same question, and the term “POSH” was coined. It stands for “plain old semantic HTML”, and its monosyllabic nature allows it to roll off the tongue in a way “semantic HTML” never did.

So I’m hoping this new term catches on. Thanks to Dan Cederholm for introducing me to this term in his blog.