Quick! What is the hexadecimal color of my logo? Don’t know? Would you need to look in my CSS maybe? Would you try loading my logo into Photoshop and see? Too slow. Those of you with ColorZilla know.

The easiest way to do it, if you use Firefox, is to install the add-on ColorZilla.

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Are you suffering from Giant Image Syndrome? The common symptoms are: squished content, wrapped content, horizontal scrolling, super long lines of text, and basic site destruction.

Right now I am working for a Fortune 100 company that has a ton of intranet sites. The IT department was nice enough to create a default template so that anyone can build a site. They even allow them to use their own creativity, by not specifying a style guide. Oops.

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For those of using the TweetMeme plugin for WordPress, they just updated it. For those of you that have never used the plugin, it allows Twitter users to tweet your post by simply clicking the button. Mine is at the bottom of this post on the left.

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A short while back I started a poll asking if you prefer blogs with just one author or more than one. Though I didn’t get a lot of votes, the answer was pretty clear. One guy (me) is not enough.

So…this post is for those of you that like to build websites, and would like to share a few ideas of your own.

Anyone care to be a guest blogger on BWI? If so, let me know.

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Go ahead, call me the Justify Cop. I haven’t been pointing fingers too much lately about the use of justify, but after a series of events that have taken place with my work, I think I have the perfect excuse. For this post thank you goes to the developers of San Antonio Air Conditioning Service. They occasionally hire me to review their sites, and were nice enough to let me allow to use this new site as an example.

Besides learning when or when not to justifying text, there is something else that this site needs to justify. It’s the content.

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Yesterday I wrote about the benefits a website visitor experience when a site has been done with valid HTML. Now it’s time for the benefits for the person or persons building the website.

Personal Benefits of Validating HTML

It’s the case of hear me now, believe me later. As I mentioned in the first post of this series, many are very defensive about not validating. The only reason I can guess why is because it just means more work, and they have never tried.

I have two things to say about that. First, it’s easier than you think, and second, once you get in the habit, you won’t see it as extra work. Below are the reasons why.

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If you are learning to build websites, or have been already, know that learning how to validate your HTML could be one of the best things you could do. My next post will be about its benefit for website owners and developers, but today it’s about the user.

They Didn’t Even Notice You Validated

Most web users don’t even know if a website has valid HTML or not. Is there a reason for them to? Not really. They just want the site to work. Do you think visitors notice when your site doesn’t work, appears messed up in their browser, or takes forever to load?

Taking the time to use W3C’s method to validate your HTML is an important step to take when building a website because it can have a huge impact on your users.

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Occasionally, I offer free advice on forums where webmasters ask for feedback on there website. When doing so, myself or another experienced webmaster will suggest that the owner asking for the review should validate their code.

The common responses:

• Validating HTML, who cares…
• I can get my site to look and work the way I want without validating. It’s a waste of time.
• It won’t help my SEO
• It takes too long
• Nobody needs to tell me how to build a site
• And the list goes on…

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My writing stinks you say. Eh…you may be right. I check my spelling, and try to make sure everything is correct. Still though, I know I need help.

Good news for me? It looks like I just found some help, and have even put this post to the test. It’s the Document Readability Test. The test reveals the number of characters, sentences, and reading comprehension level. The results also show ways to improve readability of text, and lists the most offending sentences.

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This is the second annual Top Ten Website Mistake report from BWI. The information is based on my basic usability and design analysis that I do for my clients. For 2008 see: Top Ten Website Mistakes.

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