Give It To Me Up Front…

I have been using the web browser on my phone again lately, and I am reminded again how important it is to present your main content first.

My default design for my blog is now all CSS – table free. I can leave the content where it is, but with a simple change of a tag that tells the sidebar where to display, I can change it from displaying on the right to displaying on the left. Zoom, zoom. Fast.

This matters. Maybe it doesn’t to those of you viewing this through a computer monitor, but if you were blind and had to deal with a device that reads websites to you, would you want to hear all the sidebar links first? No. And if you were waiting for a page to load on a cell phone or other mobile device, you don’t want to wait then either. My blog displays the content first, the sidebar last. If you use tables and have your sidebar on the right, that’s ok too. (Not great, but ok.) However, if you have a sidebar or two on the left, I have to wait for all of that to load before I can read your site – unless you use CSS and have the content of the sidebar at the end of your HTML code.

I understand that you probably don’t think you need to worry about accessibility – but you do. You never know who might be trying to read your site, so serve it up right.