Take:
<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>
and look in Opera under Style/Table of Contents. What do we see? At
least something that resembles a half intelligent structure. Never mind
the missing H levels (two!), nothing is perfect. The H1 is specifically
about *this particular page*. I made this general point yesterday and I
was thinking maybe you might discuss it. But so far you keep repeating
that your logo is to be this - and on every one of your pages? It tells
nothing in particular about each page?
Or maybe you are right? Perhaps it is saying "And here is yet another
page from the Apex Water Company website". Perhaps this is useful to
folks landing on the page cold? It is surely less useful to your average
*site* visitor. I don't know, I think an H1 should try hard to help the
user understand *something useful about the specific main content of the
page it is on*. Your view and that of others might differ.
When I said earlier that it is not a done deal about how things should
be organised, I was not kidding. If you look at various arguments about
how to structure H headings and generally to structure pages and
sections of pages and also if you look at how screen readers and other
voice readers read pages, and if you look at the way search engines
weight things, you will be hard put to find some uncontroversial,
consistent and good policy.
As far as I see, a web page with ads and footers and navigation menus
and other things too, is quite a mongrel. That does not mean it should
not be treated well. It just means the parts are hard to manage on a one
document structure basis. HTML runs into limitations when dealing with
mongrels.
Let's go along with the idea that the H1 is appropriately the company
name with the implied assumption of it saying that the contents of this
page are all the things the company want to say on this page. Yes, that
sounds weak. But have you any better suggestion?
Right. In that case, there should be or be implied an H2 for all the
sections that have some technically equal weight under the H1.
'Technical equal' here does not mean it is viewed by you or anyone as
equally important in all or many respects, but simply that the scope of
the H1, under our present hypothesis, goes to the whole page (ads and
all). And this scope point extends to all the heading levels. In other
words, if something is not directly under an H2 (which is under the H1),
then you might need to ask yourself what H2 is it indirectly under?
Yes, that means that if you cannot think of a reasonable scheme where
the ads would have a distant meaningful H2 heading, then you perhaps
better make the ads have an H2 heading. The footer too. The navigation,
of course! (You do this partly OK. Don't worry. But here I am
questioning the model under which you might be being advised.)
That does not mean you have to always visibly display these headings.
They can be put off to the side but still be usefully seized on by
screen readers.
Another way to go is to recognise the limitations of a web page having
an overall 'document' structure and treat the big sections (nav, main
content, and others as sui generis contexts) deserving their own set of
quite independent heading sequences. A navigation section on many
websites that (perhaps naughtily) do not sport individuality on each
page (in other words it is the same exact thing on every page) might be
considered not to belong to an overall hierarchy *of* the page. It just
*happens* to be on the page - it 'belongs' more to the site as a whole;
it could be floated off somewhere even like in a separate window. No I
am not saying to do this or that it is practical or good! I am saying
the logical structure of the matter is that you *could* do this as far
as the function and meaning and purpose is concerned.
If you don't want to get into all this stuff, what can I say: turn off
all CSS and write as if it is all turned off and have a look at how it
looks, does it all make sense? Listen to it being read out or imagine
how it goes for the non visual. Perhaps yours is good enough as it is.
