Often we get the question: “Why is my sidebar displayed under the content instead of on the side?” or “Why are the elements in my footer not being displayed correctly?”.

Weaver II has a robust design for displaying sidebars and the footer, so it is very unlikely that Weaver II is to blame. What is more likely is invalid HTML in the content area, or in the contents of one of the widgets (usually a text widget). One of the important attributes of how HTML works is that it uses balanced tags to mark up text. If the markup is not balanced with a start and matching end tag, then the browser can get confused and not really know how to display the page correctly.

For example, a commonly used tag used to organize and format HTML content is the “<div>” tag. Each <div> tag must be matched with a closing </div> tag. Weaver II (and most web pages, actually) uses <div> tags to organize specific areas: the header, sidebars, content areas, the footer, etc. Your browser uses the organization of these <div>’s and CSS rules associated with the <div>’s to layout the page. If just one <div> tag doesn’t have a matching </div>, the browser simply cannot tell where things  begin and end, and so the sidebar or footer will end up displayed incorrectly.

This can happen with other tags as well. For example, there was a site that used <h3> tags to format the content of several text widgets in the footer. The first text widget was missing the matching </h3>, and this caused the rest of the text widgets to be displayed incorrectly.

So, the answer to why stuff – usually sidebars or the footer – is not being displayed correctly is almost always that the content has invalid HTML, usually with an unbalanced <div> or other tag.

So how can you find where the error is? A good first step is to view your site using an HTML Validator site – for example http://validator.w3.org – to see what errors can be found. Usually the validator site will find quite a few “errors”, but many of them are irrelevant. You need to read through the messages to find one that mentions a tag that is unbalanced – either a missing start or a missing end tag. Then you’ll have to find the offending content or text widget (use the HTML view of pages and not the visual view), and fix it.