hismightiness wrote
The important thing is to not have HTML that is malformed to the point that a spider, bot, or text browser cannot accurately parse the content.
That's exactly what I am trying to avoid, sir. What got me thinking about all this is looking at the Google cached snapshot and seeing my horizontal menu being rendered vertically with each link/button stacked one on top of the other (Solpart menu)...said to myself, "WTF?" :)
Given that I am just starting out, I want to ensure I am on the right track going forward, rather than have to redesign the site (once I ever finish it and stop obsessing over Mr. G) later down the road...
I looked at some pure CSS and XHTML skins, but nothing floating my boat, though lots are acceptable. I do like the DNN corp site skin and those that look similar...big navigation and bright contrasting colors...will keep looking for what I have in mind, but will just follow everyone's advice, upgrade to 4.7, clean up my old-school html, and just go with the flow.
And your points are well-taken, If I spent half as much time getting quality inward links as I do worrying about this new I-don't-like-your-< font >-and- <abs >-nonsense-standard, I would probably be able to offset any nominal hit and actually be ahead of the game. :)