A little while ago, I published a basic centered two column layout.
A simple change to the style sheet and the code will improve this layout so that it is more accessible and search engine friendly.
Screen readers tend read a webpage in the order that it is coded rather than the order that it appears on screen, which is controlled by the style sheet. So, if the navigation appears above the content in the code (as it does in the above layout), someone using a screen reader will have to listen to all the navigation links before they hear the content.
This problem is exacerbated by the navigation being identical and repeated on every page.
Search engines need to analyse the content to determine what a page is about and rank it in the search results. However, they don’t always analyse the entire page, they might only look at the first 100 lines or so. If the majority of that is navigation, they are not going to find all the content. Also, the search engines want to find new content, which needs to be as near to the top of the page as possible.
The solution is to move the navigation div below the content div in the code. Then change the style sheet so the navigation and content div’s are floated to the right instead of to the left (replace float: left; with float: right;).
This retains the visual layout of navigation n the left and content on right.
