Recently by Chris Furniss

Earlier this morning, Ian sent me an email saying that the Portent Website code was great. Near perfect, even! But one thing was weighing on his mind. We weren’t passing the W3 Markup Validation. That giant red “THIS SITE ISN’T XHTML TRANSITIONAL!” message was searing into his poor SMX-addled eyeballs and I was the closest thing to Visine he could find. I coded this website myself, so I was set on the task of figuring out what exactly was wrong with the code and how I could fix it. But does validation even matter? The page displays correctly for the end user, right?

Why validation matters

We can’t all be valid. Even some top blogs don’t pass validation, including Boing Boing, Seth Godin’s blog and Engadget. Viewing these sites as they are now, the errors aren’t noticeable. Validation exists purely for code junkies and obsessive compulsive XHTML producers. You know, like me. Validation is all part of the grand unification project of the W3C, standardizing code on the web for maximum accessibility. Standards in code are good. Standards in code preserve the sanity of your coders. Anyone who has tried to update old outdated code on a website will agree; if we all just decided on how we were going to use this powerful stuff we call hypertext markup language to begin with our lives would have been easier. Validation exists to ensure your website is future-proof.

I loathe the term “web 2.0”. I think catch phrases are easy and unimaginative, and calling the recent boom of easy to use and engaging websites “web 2.0” seems to cheapen them. It sounds too trendy.

It sounds like there will be a “web 3.0” and that “web 2.0” will become obsolete once we get bored of it. There’s a lot of new ideas on this old Internet, and they will keep coming as we continue to collaborate and refine the process in which we disseminate our data.

Innovation: Separate style from content

One brilliant revelation in coding for the web in recent years has been the separation of style from content. Gone are the days of using tags for presentation, now we utilize CSS to create styles that are easily swappable and flexible enough for our plastic Internet. Today I am going to show you a simple and attractive way to add flair to important links, while preserving the ideal of separating style from content.

Oh! A blog! How quaint, you say. There’s most likely millions of blogs out there (I haven’t counted recently) so why would you want to read yet another blog? Especially yet another Internet Marketing blog! Here at Portent, we always strive to do something different. When most people hear “Search Engine Optimization” or “Internet Marketing” it conjures images of snake oil salesmen; black hat firms with shallow guarantees of top search engine rankings for three easy payments of $29.95 (cheap!).

We change the face of Internet Marketing on a daily basis using tried and true methods, uniquely developed by our firm. We’re honest, hard-working straight-shooters who love what we do. We genuinely care about our clients’ success and have the history to prove it.

So why would you want to add our blog to your already massive RSS list? Because you appreciate honesty and you love to learn. You’re all about improvement, whether it be for yourself, your business or your own clients. Our goal for the Portent Blog is not to spout our accolades back at you, we have a press release section for that. Our blog is to share with you some of the techniques and methods we have developed. The same techniques and methods that we use on a daily basis.

Portent is a full-service Internet Marketing firm. That means that we do it all, from design, to development to PPC and more. You’ll hear from each one of our departments, each author an expert in their fields and eager to share with you the stuff they love to do. You’ll find a variety of content, from what makes a killer landing page headline to how to slice a web site mock-up into semantic, keyword rich XHTML and CSS.

We’ve also got a brand-new website design, in case you didn’t notice. I’d like to give “mad props”, as the kids say, to Anna Abraham for her spectacular design that I had the privilege to code up.

Stay tuned for a whole boat-load of awesome.

Chris Furniss is a designer, HTML producer and social media guru at Portent Interactive since 2006. In his free time, he runs a podcast and blog of his own called The Weekly Geek.