My Personal Site

Huh like your view point on semantics, huh truly impressed, lol.
Also like the arguments, and hopefully I can bring some good points to the table. :)

Anyhoo the keywords meta is a minor issue as long as it is not over stuffed my personal opinion though it is pretty much useless and the time spent filling it wont bring you any noticeable increase in rankings, but I still respect your opinion if you want to use it I suppose.

You are right Yahoo! may still use it and the other 1 being AltaVista as far as I can remember it's TBH not something I check, due to the fact that it is now pointless IMO, and has been since 1998 for the majority of engines so....

in the past always pointed to title tags being a necessity for accessibility
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True totally but not in all cases, Jim Thatcher chairman of the 508 committee on web accessibility actually says ~
More Is Not Better

Often, someone new to accessibility wants to do more— with the idea that more must be better. Let' s look at an example from my hometown of Austin, Texas.
A wonderful event called the Accessibility Internet Rally of Austin, or AIR Austin, ....I have been a judge for AIR for a number of years. I was impressed with a form on one of the winning sites in AIR Austin 2005......
I am sure the team who designed the form thought that by adding more accessibility accommodations they would get more points. When I judged this site, the team got points for trying a form, but they lost on providing accessibility. This form is an example of the fact that more is not necessarily better. It uses the following techniques:

  • Each text-input field has default text (such as value="Contact name"). As discussed in the guidelines section at the beginning of this chapter, the WCAG Priority 3 checkpoint requiring default text is not applicable anymore because assistive technologies do recognize input fields when they are blank.
  • The legend for each fieldset repeats the on-screen prompt. The <legend> tag should be used to enclose groups of controls with a common purpose, such as groups of check boxes or radio buttons where the legend provides the corresponding question. When the size of the group is one, you should reconsider the design.
  • The label element is used as a container around both the on-screen prompt and the control. As explained in the previous section, this is not a good idea.
  • The label element includes a correctly coded for attribute matching the id of the control. This is the only accommodation that should have been used.
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Cite: Source of quote

Now the point is valid, and yes the W3C does say that but lets think of it's actual implementation.

You have a link like this ~
<a href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/portfolio/web/kostya-home.jpg" class="lightview" rel="gallery[kostya]" title="Kostya Magic :: Home page Design"><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/featured/featured-frame-kostya2.jpg" alt="Kostya Magic Design"/><span class="gall-type">Web Design</span></a>

Now how will a screen reader read that out to a blind user?
Which is what the W3C is getting at mainly, not entirely of coarse.
[link1] Kostya Magic colon colon Home page Design Kostya Magic Design Web Design

When what they should just hear is
[link1] Kostya Magic Home page Design

As the rest is just plain irritating, TBH because of the title attribute.

Now what you quote actually says is
...may further clarify....
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Now by repeating the anchor text in the title attribute how are you accomplishing this?
You are not, that title attributes content is not adding any clarification to the process, it's just repeating the same content, that is not clarification.

Also how does this link need to be clarified?
<a href="about.php" title="About Todd Adams">About Me</a>

It doesn't, it obvious to its destination it's a page about you, therefore no clarification is needed and we bring back in the word may. That word does not mean necessity, it means it can be added if the link is unclear to it's destination, that does not mean it has to be added as it doesn't on that link, again due to the fact that no clarification is needed to what that page is about, it's about you.

but the more I thought about it, it didn't seem semantically correct.
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Yeah I totally agree semantically that is your page heading, simple then just replace welcome with Welcome to the Online Portfolio of Web Designer Todd Adams.
And your good to go, but the problem with that is you have already clarified the point with your tag line just above it, and in the text just below it so that would be pointless, so therefore we have a trade off, semantics for better rankings.

Now don't get me wrong I am always for semantics but I wont let semantics get in the way of rankings, that is pure madness, and as your current h1 of welcome is correct, semantically, it wont do you any good in the search engines, and as the h1 has more weight in all engines, than the keyword meta, then you want it to be spot on TBH. So logically your h1 needs to contain your keywords for the search engines, which is what the alt attribute on your logo tag does for your home page. Does that make sense about that point?

You can always continue with your current way and hope you don't get penalized for cloaking as that is what you are doing, showing different content to the search engines than what the site visitor gets.
Yes average lay people will not understand it, but thats fine to me.
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Well then that's fine but to me I prefer to remove any ambiguity in wording, the way i would write it would not annoy someone who knows what it means, but would also convey to a lay man the benefits of it. Marketing in other words, explaining the benefits of features rather than listing features.

Huh like the fact someone's challenged me, lol, and you did have some good arguments IMO. :lol:

Jaz

Key:
Purple ~ XHTML
Green ~ Screen read output
 
Jaz, thanks for the response. It is a breath of fresh air to have an adult discussion around differences of opinions without it turning into child-hood bickering. My respect for you has just grown considerably, as well as my fondness of this site and community.

I will admit defeat with the title tags. It does make total sense now. It was sort've like someone telling me "the sky is actually red". Accessibility + title tags just always went together in my book. I just couldn't accept it without further exploration on my part. As a result I'm going to remove all of the title tags, BUT I do need to have the title tags for the portfolio pieces as that is whatLightView (and many of the other clones) use to display the title and caption of the image once viewed. So I guess I'm kinda screwed there.

As far as the h1 situation goes. I think you won me over there as well. I've always "tried" to be first and foremost correct semantically. But in this case I think I might agree with you. Better rankings? Or better semantics for something ultimately minute? I think you're right, rankings outweigh a minor semantic issue.

I'm still sticking to my guns on the XHTML/CSS description, but I think we've both conceided that there is no right or wrong in either of our opinions.

Thanks again!
 
Yeah, lol.
Well I cant believe I haven't won you around on the wording, huh fine off I go to my bedroom to have a sulk and play on my bike while sucking my thumb. :lol:

But I know what you mean it's nice to have a good argument about stuff at times, especially if the person knows the facts as well, I wont argue with you on one that. :D
 
Just wanted to post an update that I have finally got around to uploading a bunch of tweaks and changes to the site.

  • I've gone ahead and reworked the opening blocks of text to be a larger font from the main content
  • I've removed title tags from links after Jaz ripped me a new one and educated my ass
  • I've also restructured the way I had my H1 on the home page. On the home page alone the logo is a H1, and on all interior pages, the H1 is the title of the page. Thanks for the good discussion around that Jaz.
  • I think I have some other tweaks on the back-end as well, but can't remember them all
 
Thanks a lot for the comment br3n. I must say I am a huge fan of your work as well, really impressive stuff.
 
Just tossing in an update. I finally got around to updating the contact form to fit in with the style of the site a little better. While it was clean and simple before, as someone pointed out, it clashed with the site. I think I have kept it simple in the new version, but the added images tie it to the overall design.

Curious as to what people think of the new version.

www.61pixels.com/contact.php
 
I like the form it goes very well with the site, and the form is coded very well as well.

A couple of niggles, how dare I after you just ripped me a new 1 on semantics, but this is an address so the address tag is your baby. So this ~
<p>Todd Adams<br />
620 Glenwood Ct. #88<br />
Altamonte Springs, FL 32714</p>

Should be ~
<address>
Todd Adams<br />
620 Glenwood Ct. #88<br />
Altamonte Springs, FL 32714
</address>

Also as this is a pointless page from a search engine point of view, so you also want to remove it from the index. This will allow your others pages to spread your equity more efficiently and help them to rank better.

To accomplish this place the meta noindex,follow in the head tag.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

I would also de-activate the contact us link on the page as well TBH going on the guidlines that you shouldn't link to the page you are on both in the header and the footer.

But overal I like it.

Hope it helps.
Jaz

Key:
Purple ~ XHTML
 
I disagree that the page is "pointless" for search engines as it has all of my contact information as well is a major page on my site. Ideally I want google to index all pages on my site since it only has 4 pages. The more pages I can get on google for searches the better as far as I'm concerned :)

As far as the <address> tag, I had considered using that but for some reason I was thinking older browsers did not support the tag (cough IE6). It sounds like maybe I was wrong. If that's the case then great point and I will change that.

As far as deactivating the link. I'm going to agree to disagree there :) It is common practice to have the page you are on still a link, especially when there is an active state. I'd say 90% of sites out there use that practice; even the "gods" of web design and CSS. It also allows consistency for usability sake.

Edit: Address tag now updated and working just dandy in IE6
 
The more pages I can get on google for searches the better as far as I'm concerned
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OK but no offence that is flawed.

Lets bring in the maths.
Your site has 10,000 in equity in total (over simplified), I don't know if it does it's just a figure I pulled from the top of my head.

So you now have 3 pages sharing that 10,000 equity, so each page gets (Over simplified)~
3333.3 equity each.

Now if you remove that 1 page as people, unless you have user data to back this up, wont be searching for contacting you and then re-do the math you can see that the other 2 pages are by far more powerful and as people are more likly to be searching for a web designer based in Orlando thats the page that you want to be more powerful.

So we remove the page and that means that the page that will bring you more traffic, bare in mind not every page is equal some are worth more than others, in this case your home page from a SEO point of view is worth far more than your contact page.

Your home page and portfolio now would have 5000 equity each improving thier equity by what 25% if not more. (Again over simplified)

....even the "gods" of web design and CSS
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Well that is nice but it is a useabiltiy point, not a CSS or webdesign point.
Now what do the gods of useability say ~
Jakob Nielsen who is the god on useability with something like 14 books to his name on the subject, millions of dollars on actual user centred research says ~
Summary:
On the Web, users have a clear mental model for a hypertext link: it should bring up a new page. Within-page links violate this model and thus cause confusion.
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Now if it was a CSS issue I would go with those gods, but it isn't so sorry they may use it, but they 1. dont have the research to back it up, Nielson does, 2 are not useability experts, which is what this is covered under.

Upto you but that's how I would go with it.

Jaz
 
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