I am a Web Designer

Now I’m officially employed by Leeds Met Uni, I have access to their library facilities. So, out of interest I have a look at their Web design section. To my (expected) horror, not one book was recent. Book after book I opened was purchased between 2001 and 2003, making them not only dated in the design advice they give, but also in coding. No standards awareness, no accessibility best practice etc…

I look again and see if it becomes better!!

I have been deliberating this for some time, and in the past have often used a background image to display the website’s logo. This is invariably as a background replacement for the H1 text to score points in the SEO arena. But this has always left me somewhat uncomfortable. The logo of a website isn’t mere style, its valid and contextual content, it is a visual representation of that company and in that sense it is its face. The face of a named individual would always be presented as an IMG inline image, so why not the logo? Also, talking of SEO(search engine optimisation), this logo would then have to declare an ALT value, thus providing a very important aid to the site’s google ranking that is otherwise lacking with a mere background-image. So an inline img logo plus and h1 header value would provide proper semantic markup and increase a site’s SEO performance.