xhtml | css | DesignThe republic of Jens Wedin (with me as the president)

We had a discussion at work about what the default margin is for p, h1 and table etc. Do you know? It was not like we thought. I thought that there is about 10px above and under most elements, this would add up to 20px which it is when you have an unstyled document.

I did some googling and found a great article over at Eric’s blog. He points out that you can take a look at the default CSS in some browsers, for example Firefox and Safari. Just search your harddrive for HTML.css and you’ll find it in one of your browsers folder.

Well, I found out that h1 has an margin-top of 0.67 ems. So I was completely wrong. The smaller heading there is the larger the top margin gets. p also has an top margin of 1.0 ems.

There was also some tips about unstyling the default CSS and one thing I never thought about is that you can set title, style and meta to display: block to see what is in the head of the document. Kind of cool.

I have been running this site on the default template that came with WordPress for a few weeks now. I did notice that searching google on JediSthlm or Jens Wedin I only came up roughly around 5th to 10th place on their ranking. That was not very good, I wanted first place of course.

I did have a look in the default template that comes with WP. First I notice that the top area used a h1, then in the content area there was a h2 for the date and then a h3 for the article headings. I thought this was not very good so I changed it a bit. The top area got an div, the date got an div and the articles heading changed from h3 to h1. I also changed the title some, from “JediSthlm – a webpage by Jens Wedin” to “JediSthlm | XTHML | CSS | Webdesign | Photography | Jens Wedin”.

This week, only a few days after the change I got 2nd place on google when searching for JediSthlm and 1st place when searching for Jens Wedin. I most say that this is great. Only by changing the code some I got an better ranking. So a good advice is to take a look at the semantic of your pages. Just by changing the headings around you could gain alot of ranking on Google and other search engines.