Hi Damien, We recommend reserving the <h1> to describe the page content. Perhaps on the homepage and the 'About us' page this might be the same as the website name.
Should you want to include the site name on the page, we recommend appending it to <title> text instead. For example, if the page is on 'New Zealand Postal History 101' and your site is 'United Philatelists', the title element would be: <title>New Zealand Postal History 101 | United Philatelists</title> See our glossary entry for more on the title element: < http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/meta.php > Both in terms of both SEO and download speed (and as speed translates to improved user experience), shorter, topic-centric pages are preferred. What is often overlooked in discussion of the use of <h1>, is that of the overall user experience/content. Namely: What encourages a user to link to a webpage from a search engine results page (aside from relevance ranking)? Is it on the basis of the site owner rather than, or above the page content? While the site owner (effectively the 'publisher') may recommend one webpage above another, 'declaring' the site owner in the webpage <h1> does not appear to server the needs of the user. That said, there are a number of content distinctions that XHTML does not have a dedicated element for, and 'site owner' /'site name' is one of them. (Re: Andy Budd's blog.) As to whether there should be more than one <h1> element per page, that depends on how you choose to break-up ('chunk') content. Sometimes it is beneficial to create a single page multi-screen document, for example when the page is likely to be printed. In such cases, each <h1> is likely to correspond to a 'chapter heading'. Perhaps there are assistive technology (e.g. screen reader) considerations someone would like to add? What is the impact on the user experience of 'announcing' the site owner when each page loads? (Positive or negative.) >I've read different opinions on what should be in the h1, and there are a >number of different options/practices. >1. Site title (ex. John's website) >2. Page/document title (ex. Contact me) >3. Combination (ex. John's website - Contact me) >4. Something else? > >Which do you think is the most appropriate? Or does it depend on the site? å -- Andy Kirkwood | Creative Director Motive | web.design.integrity http://www.motive.co.nz ph: (04) 3 800 800 fx: (04) 970 9693 mob: 021 369 693 93 Rintoul St, Newtown PO Box 7150, Wellington South, New Zealand ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
