You have probably seen some cool effects like stripes or other background patterns that seem to set off the design of a web page perfectly. Well now these professional, subtle looking effects can easily be implemented into your own pages with a minimal amount of effort thanks to the efforts of a few programmers.

The following is a list of online background pattern generators that will create a background pattern for you to download and use in your web design. We hope you find these useful.

Background Maker

bgMaker offers a very simple interface. As you make changes to the box, you can see the visual result immediately. Once you are happy with the result, click save and the background image is saved to your computer. This site relies completely upon your own creativity to develop a background pattern.

BgPatterns.com

We have featured this site before in Online Background Pattern Generator. This site is also very easy to use and offers a wide variety of pre-built background images to help get your creative juices flowing.

COLOURlovers.Com

This site is similar to BgPatterns in that it offers a library of patterns to get you started. You may also upload your own patterns and customize them on the site. They seem to have a very active community of users to share your ideas with. One major advantage that this web site has is that it is available in 12 languages.

Dotted Backgrounds Generator

This is a very simple to use background generator for creating a series of dots that gradually disappear down the screen. The features and options of this background generator are a bit limited, but the results are good.

Pattern Cooler

This online generator has one of the best libraries of professional looking patterns I have seen. Each of these can be customized to your own color combination as well. If there is a specific type of pattern you are looking for, the home page offers a set of tags at the top to point you in the right direction.

Striped Backgrounds

This site only offers striped backgrounds. But this is sometimes the subtle touch that a web page or header may need. Like the other entries, this site is very easy to use and the results can be downloaded to your own computer with the click of a button.

Stripe Designer

This online generator is not as easy to use as some of the others. But it does offer a bit more than just stripes. You can also add a background image to the background and add a striped, or other type of texture as an overlay.

Stripe Generator

This is one of the easier online stripe generators we used. There are far more options available to give your striped background that professional Web 2.0 look and feel. Once you decide on your color scheme, you can also create a tartan background pattern with the same color scheme with the click of a button.

Stripe Mania

While the features of this online generator weren’t as many as some of the others, the results were impressive. With fewer options to worry about, we were able to develop a more professional set of Web 2.0 stripes in a shorter period of time. The user interface is pleasing to the eye and very intuitive.

Tartan Maker

While a tartan background wouldn’t be our first choice for some of our web sites, we were impressed by the output from this online generator. If you are looking for a subtle yet professional tartan background, this is your site. The user interface is very simple to use as were most of our entries. This is a sister site to Stripe Generator and if you have the need to generate image reflections or generate navigation tabs, these folks offer an online generator for you as well.

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1. Proofread. Would you trust a blog that was riddled with spelling and grammar errors? While everyone makes the occasional mistake when it comes to typing or just knowing the rules of the language, in general, your content should be relatively error free. This means actually reading it over, at least once, before you post it.
2. Pick a topic. There are few truly successful blogs out there that talk about everything. Most focus on a topic like technology, productivity, celebrity gossip or even cats who want cheeseburgers. No matter what kind of things you’re interested in, you’ll be much more successful narrowing your content down to a few central topics or themes.
3. Work on titles. Much like a newspaper, your headlines are what sell the rest of your content. Coming up with titles that are effective and will draw in readers to find out more is essential to becoming a successful blogger. You can write all the great content in the world but if no one reads it, it’s all for naught.
4. Be relevant. While you may still have several poignant things to say about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the fact is that the rest of the world could probably care less. Make sure that your content is fresh and up-to-date and not simply rehashing old issues that are no longer relevant.
5. Have a point of view. You could simply report on events, news and happenings but your readers can get that from a much more authoritative source: a newspaper. No matter what you choose to talk about, put your own spin on things and offer your opinion, even gently, on issues. You have to figure out a way to make your blog unique, and without a point of view that might be hard.

Think about the blogs you visit regularly and what makes their content interesting or worth adding to an RSS feed. Intelligence, humor and an interesting point of view will go a long way in getting repeat visits to your site.

This post was contributed by Meredith Walker, who writes about the online associate degree. She welcomes your feedback at MeredithWalker1983 at gmail.com

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This is complex because, in the past, a blog owner needed to understand some of the PHP code in a Wordpress theme before they could begin to make any custom changes. The process usually involves finding a theme that you like, and then changing as little as possible for the desired look.

Using Wordpress Child Themes makes the customization process much easier.

I found out about this feature while doing some research on Wordpress Theme Frameworks, which will be a topic for a future date. The process to setup a Child Theme is simple.

Step 1 – create a directory in the /Theme/ directory of your blog with the name of your theme (i.e. – /themes/mytheme/).

Step 2 – in your new directory, create a file called ’style.css’

Step 3 – add the following lines of code to your newly created style.css file:

/*
Theme Name: Rose
Theme URI: the-theme's-homepage
Description: a-brief-description
Author: your-name
Author URI: your-URI
Template: use-this-to-define-a-parent-theme--optional
Version: a-number--optional
*/

Note the line in bold text. This is the key. Change the value for Template from “use-this-to-define-a-parent-theme–optional” to the directory name of the Wordpress theme you will be using as a template — or Parent Theme. So if you are using a Theme such as Arthemia as a Parent theme, the Template line would look as follows:

Template: arthemia

Step 4 – Now we want to import the styles from the Parent Theme by adding only 1 line to our Child Theme style.css.

@import url(../arthemia/style.css);

If you have a look at your blog now, it should look exactly like your Parent Theme. What you’ve just done is created a safe work space to make changes to the Parent Theme without touching any of the original theme files.

Now you are ready to begin adding CSS styling to your style.css file to customize your Child Theme. Any style declarations that you make to the style.css file in your Child theme will over ride those from the Parent Theme.

If you still need to make changes to the theme files, simply copy the Parent Theme template file to your Child Theme directory and make the edits. WordPress will look in the Child Theme directory first for template files. If an alternate version of a template file exists, WordPress will use that template file instead of the file in the Parent Theme directory.

For more on this topic, have a look at the Wordpress Codex. We would also like to thank the people over at ThemeShaper for the inspiration behind this article.

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The first thing you need to answer this question is a reason to have a blog. If you have never blogged before, the effort might not seem worthwhile.

So I’ve written down a few reason you might want to start blogging, whether for personal or business reasons.

• Announce Events

If you are a bar or a restaurant owner, a blog is a great way to let your customers know more about you and your offering. It is also a great way to let them know when special events are going on. Perhaps it’s a Live music venue, or even a sporting event. Staying in front of your customers even when they are not in your establishment help you to get return business.

• Announce Specials

During certain times of the year, perhaps holidays or even low season, you may run specials on certain items to help draw your customers back when they normally might not consider it.

• Share Your Knowledge on a Topic or Industry

If people seem to be always asking you about certain topics, writing about them helps you reach a wider range of people wth similar questions. Chance are, if one person has a question, there are more people with questions. I find that even when I think I know the only answer, doing a bit of research on the Internet yields some results I hadn’t yet considered. including this additional research into a Blog post can draw in more readers to your blog. If your a business owner, this in turn allows you to advertise your products and services to a like minded group without being intrusive. Once the article title has peaked their interest, they visit your blog and discover your other articles as well as your service offering.

• Share travel or other experiences

The world is becoming a much smaller place, thanks to the Internet. Many people have traveled and recorded their experiences on their visits to far off countries … or even places close by their own home. In either case, there are people that research a place before they go to visit. Your knowledge and experience could be beneficial to helping them enjoy their trip. And if you’re in the travel industry, you might just find a way to offer your services to these visitors.

• Share photos

I really enjoy looking at photo blogs. Especially when they are focused on a certain topic and maintain that focus. Many professional photographers have their own galleries online with examples of their work.

These examples are just a few, high level suggestions based upon our own limited experience. But hopefully, it gets you thinking about the ways that you might be able to start blogging.

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I have seen many people on Twitter asking for a good Gallery plug-in for WordPress. Our choice for a plug-in would be NextGen. But, it occurred to me that many people don’t realize that WordPress has this feature built in already. It’s not the prettiest or the coolest gallery I have seen. But it does the job in a pinch.

The setup for a gallery is very easy. And inserting it into a post or page is done with a “shortcode”.

First, start a new post and give it a title. Then, using the Media Toolbar, add in your images. The Media Toolbar is that row of icons just above the editing area start with “Upload/Insert”. Click on the first icon to open the Media Uploader.

I have trouble with the Flash Uploader so I use the Browser Uploader.

I upload my image, and select the options I want for that image. DO NOT click on “Insert into Post”. ONLY click on the “Save all changes” button. Your image will then be added to the Gallery and this will be reflected in the Media windows tabs.

Add as many pictures as you want, always clicking on “Save all changes”. You will see the number of images in your gallery increase. After uploading and clicking the correct button to save, you are always taken to the gallery tab. After you have uploaded you last image, select the option you want for your gallery. When you’re finished, click on “Insert Gallery”.

You should now see a Gallery shortcode appear in your post similar to the following:
[gallery link="file" orderby="post_name"]

You can also assign your own tags for enclosing the various elements of the image gallery. I have select tags to enclose my items, thumbnails and captions.
[gallery link="file" orderby="post_name" itemtag="div" icontag="span" captiontag="p"]

Here is my result (courtesy of Matt Stuart):

There is more about this shortcode in the WordPress Codex.

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What does this mean to those of us who use Google Adsense on our websites and blogs?

Let’s understand what “interest-based advertising” is first. To quote the Google Adsense site, “Interest-based advertising enables advertisers to reach users based on their interests (e.g. ’sports enthusiasts’), and allows them to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser websites. To complement interest-based advertising, the Ads Preferences Manager lets users view and edit their interest categories.”

The idea is to provide a greater level of focus and granularity for serving relevant ads to users. The technology behind this is called the “DoubleClick DART cookie“. As you browse websites in the AdSense network, Google stores an advertising cookie in your browser to understand the types of pages that you are visiting. This information is used to show ads based on interest categories that might appeal to you. If you don’t like the interest groups that Google has assigned, you can edit their list of interest categories within the Ads Preferences Manager.

Google has made it clear that the use of this technology is used in accordance with their privacy policy, stating “It is not used to identify users personally and we don’t show ads based on personal information. We also will not show ads based on sensitive information or interest categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories, without a user’s opt-in consent”.

Google is suggesting that website owners update their privacy policy to reflect the changes if you are using the Adsense to serve ads on your website.

For more information on Google interest-based advertising, check out this list of frequently asked questions.

Recommendations on updating your privacy policy can be found here.

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Between website design projects, I get a chance to wander the web and I have found some very helpful web services and tools that go into a quick access bookmark toolbar. Over the years we have collected quite a library of useful tools.

Here is my list of web services and tools that have helped make my life easier as a website designer.

Making Sure Things are Working

Are My Sites Up
Are My Sites Up will track you sites to make sure they are still online. The free service allows you to track up to 20 sites and can notify members via email or SMS. Site checks are done up to 25 times per day.
The premium service will check up to 60 sites as often as every 15 minutes and comes with all features of the free service plus Twitter integration and RSS feeds.
Down for Everyone or Just Me
This service will help you determine if any problems with a specified site are happening for all visitors, or only for you. This is a nice web tool for determining if you have firewall problems.

Productivity and Planning

Creative Pro Office
This is a great little suite for managing multiple projects and multiple resources across those projects. Better yet, this web tool is free. It offers Client management, Project management, Resource management at multiple levels, and Financial management modules. We use this web tool to manage our projects and it has proven to be a great help at keeping our web services well delivered and organized.

ScrnShots
This web tool provides an easy way to take, find, and share screen shots of websites or anything else displayed on your screen. You can upload screen shots to your own account, retrieve screen shots, or search others screen shots by keywords.

You can even embed screen shots in your website at full size or thumbnail size. This is also a great web tool to share your conceptual ideas with your website design customers.

HTML Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
When putting together a website design, it just doesn’t look right unless there is some textual content to show exactly how the design is going to flow. These two web services easily generate any combination of dummy text for you.

HTML Ipsum is good for quick content for paragraphs, lists, tables or any other combination where you need to quickly populate it with some text. Lipsum allows you to customize your output a little bit. They even offer some Lipsum banners for testing out those advertising banner areas of the website.

Graphics, Drawing, Images and Design Tools

Color Scheme Designer
This is a very nice web tool that allows you to select a primary design color and create a color scheme to match. The results are very nice and provides some good ideas for color schemes that I ordinarily wouldn’t have thought of without the tool.

Golden Ratio Calculator
If you don’t know about the Golden Rule of design, you still have a way to go in website design. This tool is a necessity to making your web pages have that indescribable feature that makes people really like the look of your website.

The have a downloadable tool for Mac users, but the online version works well for the rest of us. Simply enter in the width of an area and let the web tool calculate all of the combinations that fit around your number to make it part of the “Golden Rule”.

HTM2PDF
This was a tough one to categorize. It is not really a website design tool, but it is useful in dealing with your customers.

This web tool allows you to convert a web page by entering its URL or you can simply cut and paste the RAW HTML code. They also offer a bookmarklet to convert websites you visit on the fly. They are developing some other tools that you may want to keep an eye on as well. We noticed a screen shots tools and a tools to resize images on the fly. Should be interesting.

Snipplr
A whole slew of useful code snippets for those redundant, but necessary tasks. Example – Country Drop Down List for Web Forms

Web 2.0 Logo Creatr
We love this tool. If your on the road, or just in need of a quick, but impressive web 2.0 style logo design, this web tool provides the goods. Creatr takes all of the hassles of learning an application out of the equation and concentrates on what the designer is after.

The best part is that this is not the only web tool provided, making this a web service. You can also create your own web 2.0 background. They also have a blog button web service as well to easily create those small but effective buttons for your blog.

Finance and Money

Project Estimator
Even though this tool is not intended to provide estimates directly to prospective web clients nor is it intended to generate finished proposals, its output is certainly client worthy. The tools works well for determining (roughly) an estimate for developing a website … or any project you might have for that matter. Each line item is customizable as well as the title and standard rate.

This is one of those web tools that is good to keep around because you will use it at some point.

Social Networking

TweetDeck
Now this is an odd addition to our set of tools and it is very recent. We have started to use Twitter to interact with our clients, and potential clients. TweetDeck has proven to be the most effective way for us to use Twitter to accomplish this.

This web tool allows you to setup several windows to monitor the various types of Twitter communication between you and your followers, or followees. The combination of this tool and Twitter has seen a significant increase in traffic to our web sites. Any tool that can help drive visitors to our site and make them customers is worth a look. This one comes highly recommended.

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Recently, my friend Herb over at “What’s This Web Thing“, posted this list of 55 SEO tips. There is a lot of helpful information in here, without any of the hype that you often see in these sorts of lists. I am republishing this with Herb’s permission.

Enjoy!

1. If you absolutely MUST use Javascript drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it. (There is a great list of how to do this with different languages and a redirect checker as well http://www.webconfs.com)

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three times a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

The SEO Consultants website has a nice header checking tool.

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So I decided to embark on a journey using CSS Frameworks to see if they could reduce my CSS pain and allow me to design a website more rapidly. Here is a summary of my first experience.

I began to consider my options for choosing a CSS Framework in response to a post I saw on Noupe ( 5 Popular CSS Frameworks + Tutorials & Tools for Getting Started ).

I began by going through the list of frameworks reviewed and downloading each one. I have an XAMPP distribution installed on my computer which I use for development. So I unpacked the files for each framework distribution into its own directory from the web root.

It is noteworthy that the version numbers of most distributions are pre-release or beta (i.e. – Blueprint is version 0.8).

I then set out to examine each one for how easy it was to use in my development environment. My first task was to review the documentation and see how easy it was to use. I was reminded of the painful reality that good developers are very impressive at getting your applications to do cool things. But they still lack the desire to document anything to the point that the rest of us can understand how the thing works. This doesn’t apply to all developers of course. But it certainly applies to most of the framework developers.

The most thorough documentation provided was for the YAML (Yet Another Multi-column Layout) CSS Framework. Full documentation was provided in English and German and the examples included were very impressive. But it was still difficult for me to determine the best way to use their CSS classes. In every distribution, I was looking for something that resembled a quick reference sheet of their classes. Looking through the CSS code didn’t offer too much more comfort either. It looked like I would need to spend a lot of time trying to understand what they did before I could begin to use it.

My preferred CSS Framework is Blueprint. The BluePrint CSS Framework had minimal documentation, but it was concise and easy to understand. Of all of the distributions, I was up and coding quicker with BluePrint than with any other distribution. The grid system used is a 24 column approach that allows you to easily specify the width of column and container with just a class.

The BluePrint CSS Framework was the easiest to use and understand from my viewpoint. However, they all need a bit of work to become the Rapid Application Development tools they are striving to be. They have all included fixes for the faults of Internet Explorer, but this is still no guarantee that you won’t have cross browser compatibility problems.

After quickly designing a new layout for my site, I was disappointed to see that IE still didn’t respect my layout options. I needed to tweak the CSS to make the page work in IE. The good news was that the amount of effort in tweaking was far less than if I had developed the CSS from scratch. Also, the website looks great, and as expected in all browsers non-IE. The bad news is that, even after the tweaking, there are still some minor formatting issues in IE.

CSS Frameworks In Summary

I really came to appreciate the challenge it must be to develop a CSS Framework when one of the most popular browsers doesn’t conform to the industry standard. Any respect I ever had for IE is now completely gone.

Many CSS Frameworks still require some work if they want to become what they are meant to be – a Rapid Application Development tool.

It is still early days for CSS Frameworks. I am looking forward to seeing these develop further. I am sure it will become much easier once all browsers comply with the standard.

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I got to seeing this enough that I began to wonder what it meant. And why was it important that a page be “valid”.

First, let’s understand what it means to have a valid web page. Then, this will help us why we might want our website to be branded as “valid”.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard … for HTML and XML-derived Web document types”. The WC3 develops and maintains the specifications and guidelines for the web in the interest of keeping standards at the heart of what the Internet is built upon.

These same standards effect how browsers work and render web pages.

So as long as your web pages are written, or generated according to the specifications outlined by the W3C, your website site should be “valid”. This is true to a point, and much easier said than done.

If you have ever undertaken a website design project, you have probably played with your HTML files until everything looked absolutely perfect. Happy with your accomplishment, you pop off an email to all of your friends to proudly show off your new creation. Moments later, one of your friends tells you about a part of your page that just doesn’t look right. Horrified, you bring up the page in your browser and feel relieved for a very brief moment to see it render properly. Then you realize that your friend is using a different browser, and that the trick you read about on the web that caused that cool effect was causing the page to render improperly in certain browsers.

Non-valid pages are relying on the built-in error-correction of the users browser. This error correction acts very different across the various browsers and versions. Not so long ago, many website authors used a trick that worked in Netscape 1.1 and suddenly found their pages were totally blank in Netscape 2.0. As browsers have moved more towards being standards compliant, we see less of this issue with the way browsers render HTML and more problems with the way they handle CSS.

This brings us to the reason why to validate your website.

The difference in the way browsers render a page is a primary reason to validate your code. Many of us start out designing websites with WYSIWYG web page editors that can improperly generate a web page, and not necessarily to a published standard. Running a web page through a validation service will point out where any problems might exist.

Many of use also enjoy the creativity we can engage in when designing a site. When rendered properly, these creative tricks are reason for website visitors to be impressed. But if you’re a designer looking to make an impression on a client, and they visit using a different browser, the effects could be disastrous to our website design careers. Validation helps us stick to the standards.

With the popularity of WordPress and other Content Management Systems (CMS), many web pages are generated dynamically. Validation will help point out any errors in our code where the HTML is not being generated properly.

Using non-standard HTML also introduces the risk of having to rewrite your web pages later. There are HTML tags that are introduced from time to time that don’t last very long in the standards. Using one of these may produce some cool effects. But once the browsers stop supporting it, your page will look like an amateur. Does anyone remember the “layer” or “ilayer” command?

Now that we have some compelling reasons to validate, how do you validate a web page?

The crew at W3C have been kind enough to provide a Free web page validation service that tests your pages against the world wide industry standard. There are other services, but as the W3C has taken lead in an effort to prevent web fragmentation, it makes sense to use a validation service that was designed to work to the W3C Recommendations.

They also provide services to validate specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or CSS stylesheets, Mobile content, or to find broken links in your web pages. The W3C offers a range of Quality Assurance validation tools.

Now for the a dose of reality.

Once you run your web page through the validation service, you will notice some very unexpected results.

If you have used a DOCTYPE declaration (DTD), you will immediately notice that this value is used to determine how the rest of the page should be validated. This makes a significant difference. The DOCTYPE or DTD is required for HTML and XHTML pages and must be spelled out exactly according to the specifications. What I didn’t realize is that there is even a DTD for CSS Stylesheets as well. Here is a complete list of DTDs you can use in your web pages.

Getting past this first step is a major hurdle to getting your pages validated. Don’t get too frustrated. If you cannot seem to get rid of one or two errors, your pages will still render properly. The specifications and guidelines are still going through changes that are difficult to understand for most of us.

It demonstrates the fact that there is some significant ground to cover before we can say that there are a complete set of standards for designing web sites. It also makes you appreciate how far the industry has come and the work involved to get to where we are today.

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