These State of my Toolset blog posts are becoming a annual tradition on pixelyzed.com and this year will be no different. If 2012 had been a year of all around stability and growth for me and my business, 2013 was one of continued growth in my business but one of significant change in my toolset.

Those changes were brought by the same desire for efficiency and refinement to my workflow that I’ve described before but also because I’ve been going back to some of the core principles I learned and followed when I first learned my craft and started my business in the mid to late 90’s and early 2000s. I was a strong Web standards advocate then, long before it was popular to do so and long before Web professionals realized that clean, semantic HTML code was good for search engines optimization and accessibility (that was before Google…).

While not exactly bad in that respect, I started to feel that iThemes Builder, my main theme framework in 2012 and the first half of 2013, was not as good as I’d liked in that regard. I was starting to find its HTML markup way too heavy with an overuse of div containers, too many CSS classes and not enough effort placed on semantics. This was done by design at iThemes with the goal to make creating different layouts Builder as flexible as possible. I was also starting to find styling it (CSS) tedious and frustrating because of all those extra containers with similar class names that made the code difficult to read.

In addition to that, my business partnership with a designer has given me more time to concentrate on strategy for my clients in the last year and see what I could do to help them better with their business. This entails many things not related to WordPress but, one of the ways I felt I could improve our offering and our WordPress development process is with natural on page SEO. That means, among other things, clean semantic markup and faster load times. So I started re-assessing my themes toolset and looked for ways to improve it. Again, not because Builder was bad at this but it’s not using HTML 5 elements and it’s heavier markup makes it so search engines have to get through more code to get at the actual content. It’s not a ton more, but SEO is so competitive, I figured that every little bit counts.

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