Plain Old Semantic HTML

Web Standards in Design

Martin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:12:03 +0000

There has been updates to the web standards authority site. It’s also moving on up in Google’s SERPs. All in all, great info and SEO.

Shopping For Standards

Martin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:35:49 +0000

photo credit: Cosmic Kitty
Shopping for web standards in design will kill you! I mean, if you look for a web designer that specializes in standards compliant designs, you have to turn over rocks to find them!

Target Looses Lawsuit To Blind Users

Martin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:49:28 +0000

photo credit: Rhian vK

If you have been following the latest news in accessibility and retail, then you’ve heard of the lawsuit between the retail giant Target and blind users of the internet. Let’s say you wanted to to buy something online from Target. You could not, and more importantly, you would be discriminated against. All because Targets website is inaccessibly designed. But because of the lawsuit, the Target that’s going to be changed. Target has been ordered by the courts to pay $6 million on the class action lawsuit against them.

Here’s a quote from the ruling:

“Furthermore, the settlement requires Target to implement internal guidelines to make its site more accessible to the blind by Feb. 28, 2009, with assistance from the NFB. The retailer and the NFB have agreed to a three-year relationship during which the advocacy group will keep testing the site to make sure it is accessible to the blind who use technologies such as screen-reading software. NFB said it will certify the site through its own certification program once the improvements are completed.”

photo credit: The Wandering Angel
This is great news for web standards, accessibility, and the many disabled and other users everywhere!

Semantic WordPress Themes Revisited

Martin — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:23:22 +0000

photo credit: schoschie

It seems to keep coming up in conversations I have - that the WordPress CMS is probably the best platform for a site owner to run “out of the box”. And with that, there are tons of (X)HTML correct and valid, Semantic WordPress Themes available. Heck, I will even create one for you!

Affordable Web Hosting

Martin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:58:49 +0000

photo credit: richardmasoner
During the end of last year (2007), and up to now (August 15th, 2008), I have gone from switching my web host company close to four times - yes, I did say four times! And I say “close” because just recently I switched back to the one I am on now. I had actually ran my sites on their servers for one week, but strange DNS issues as well as other things made the decision for me to switch back. So why did I put myself through all that (DNS) torture? Well, for me, it came down to a few things…

Price
Services
Tech response times
Reseller availability
Customer satisfaction ratings

Running Semantically correct websites myself is a chore within itself, but to also be a hosting reseller, and hosting those same sites as well…that’s like being the surgeon to your own operation! What I recommend you do, if you are like me want want all the best in a web host, you must do your homework! Find a company that has a reputation for both reliability and excellent customer service; one that is very competitive and affordable in their packages. And of course, the must have first rate technical support we well as reseller hosting options. Out of the “almost” four companies I have used for my reseller hosting account, I can honestly say that two of them were just too expensive for their services, and one was rapidly failing in tech support, so I had to “jump ship” so to speak.

So along those lines, I have found Affordable web hosting in imhosted.com - and specifically love their reseller hosting packages. I am a very picky shopper, so imhosted.com needed to have a very customer friendly site that offered high quality services for hosting to their customers. From the reviews I have read, they are extremely reliable in the web hosting industry, and they are highly rated for their specific focus on a “full service” solution.

I have to say that - at least for me - customer service is a huge issue. I expect to recieve the highest levels of support, or I will go elsewhere. I would even pay a bit more for a great support team, than pay cheap prices, and receive cheap support. Since imhosted.com has a great reputation for their services, support, and pricing, I would recommend them to you webmasters who want the best for your clients.

Semantic Advertising

Martin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:53:04 +0000

Semantic Advertising (advertising based around the meaning of text). Now that’s a topic worthy of discussion, especially when one considers an alternative to Google is tangible.

According to CEO Amiad Solomon,

(Semantic Advertising (advertising based around the meaning of text))…will help make advertising more relevant to viewers.

What do you think?

Hello all you Graphic…

Martin — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:57:21 +0000

photo credit: Kate_A

Hello all you Graphic Designers. I’m looking for a Graphic Designer to partner with this website or just to get jobs that require unique, original graphic design. Please use the contact form on this site to get a hold of me if you’re interested. Thanks. listen

Semantics Are Not Marketable!

Martin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:48:27 +0000

photo credit: kamaru

I’ve read some disparaging remarks that some marketers (pretty much all of them…) have said in regards to semantics. Specifically statements to the effect that, “I tried using valid web standards markup, but they didn’t pay off in SERPs, so I stopped using them.”

Too bad for the world. These marketers will continue to put out depreciated, non-semantic web sites. And they throw tons $$$ in SEO at them, and those sites spread (like cancer) throught the world wide INaccessible web. Who cares about the byproduct of using valid/semantic HTML anyway, if it doesn’t fit their bottom dollar? Well, I do. I care about that byproduct. Its accessibility. And it’s needed…

Why Do Standards Get Ignored?

Martin — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:47:54 +0000

photo credit: twenty_questions

For many designers, learning how to hand code (X)HTML is too much effort, especially when you can use Photoshop/Dreamweaver to do it for you.

And since learning how to hand code will for the most part enable a designer to learn semantically correct markup, it does require one to spend time doing it. And that is the problem…

Blog Design Standards

Martin — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:38:10 +0000

photo credit: wetwebwork
Do you remember when you first checked out the source code for a web site in the 1990’s? My experience was with the Netscape browser, and the Netscape proprietary blink tag. Let me tell you that from that time on, I would print out the HTML markup and study it. Even then, I wanted more…and that’s when I found that MicroSoft had their own markup tag called “marquee“. Man, I became the 90’s geek that everyone wanted him to make their web sites blink and scroll!

It’s a good thing that my coding abilities have improved since then. Web design in general has come along way since then too, and specifically in the realms of semantic XHTML and standards-based markup. From a tag-soup junkie to a member of the Standards-based community, I have been evangelizing web standards in our internet world that is still to this day blasted with HTML code splashed with tables for layouts. I have seen the font tag used still today, and I’ve even come across that old friend (read: fiend) blink tag used on web sites that I have been to this month as I surf the Net.

Welcome to 2008 - where I’d like to present this topic as a discussion for us to comment on, as it relates to a hot topic - designing a blog. We have to consider that our blogs should be eye-candy dressed and semantically correct, (X)HTML valid. That’s one of the great things I love about the WordPress CMS platform. It has readily available themes from standards-thinking coders. I myself use many of the theme templates that I find from web sites that host them. Of course, I only use the ones that use validate, semantically correct (X)HTML. And of course, I only download from authoritative WordPress them sites.

You will find that the masses of themes you can get (from the free to the premium ones) are using (X)HTML markup that does validate with the online W3C checkers. I have found that I must manually edit most of the plugins I use because they are not valid markup, but actually, I can live with most of those as is.

So join this discussion if you are a member of the web design community, or are simply interested in blog and design creation. Please - let us here what your brain has to say by commenting!