Float this image over to the right. What code do I use to do that again? What’s the HTML for a blockquote … and what about one with a name attached?

On this site I always find myself referring back to old blog posts to see how I coded a particular piece of content, which quickly gets pretty tiresome.

On large sites, it becomes even harder to track all the styles you are using to format different types of content.

This makes it difficult to make sure that you reuse existing styles rather than create new, potentially duplicate ones, and to monitor the effect of altering the styling for a particular content type on other content styling.

It’s not exactly practical to keep looking back through the style sheet once it gets to be hundreds of lines long.

This is why I created a content formatting quick reference guide, or markup guide, so that I can easily see what HTML I need to use to add certain types of content such as a centered image with a caption.

This quick reference also enables me to make CSS edits and easily see the impact on the formatting of my content without referring to multiple pages across my site.

And it enables me to see the impact of changing the formatting of one type of content on other content types.

For example, if I change the spacing following an unordered list, what impact does that have if it is followed by a heading rather than a paragraph? Do my tables play nicely with other content types? And so on.

I’ve personally found this to be quite helpful, if only because it removes the need for me to keep viewing source to see the markup for commonly used elements that I just can’t seem to remember the code for.

What are some tactics that other people use when it comes to this issue? Sticky notes?

Her home page has an overall bounce rate of around 30-35%. The bounce rate from Google is about 12%, and the average time on page is around a minute (there’s quite a lot of content) so clearly it is doing something right.

Sure, I could refresh the colors and move some content around. But is this a good use of my time and her money when the home page represents 20-25% of page views?

Yes, that’s a lot for a single page. However, when the other pages on her site represent over 75% of pageviews, it makes sense to spend most of my time on their maintenance and improvement rather than on the home page.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. It’s a small site, so almost all of those pages play an important in driving business.

However, I don’t remember when some of these other pages haven’t had their content updated. And, visually very little has been done from a design standpoint. This is why I tried to explain that her home page is actually far less important than she thinks.