Apr 23
Validating your Work
Making sure your work is clean and correct is a basic requirement in web design.
Why?
Why should the code be checked? I have seen many times how incorrect code can confuse a search engine spider or create problems when a website is viewed by different browsers. What may look fine in Firefox may look different in Windows and different in Safari.
I agree that there are many ways to do design a website, but making sure it is W3C complaint should be essential. Now that I said this, I also must admit, that I have seen poorly coded pages show up well in the SERPs – (Search Engine Result Pages). There could be a number of reasons why that may happen, but it does. Even though poorly coded pages can perform well, I will stick to the concept that clean coded pages stand a better chance of higher rankings and better performance for web browsers.
Working as a web optimizing firm, I see a good deal of code. I use many tools to check the code of a website. Either I or the web designer will correct the code.
The following sites are essential for any web designer or web site owner who wants to check their new web site.
Validating Your Web page
http://validator.w3.org/
Validating Your CSS
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Validating Links – Link Checker
http://validator.w3.org/checklink
Validator for XML
http://www.w3.org/2001/03/webdata/xsv
Help and FAQ for the Markup Validator
http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html
Check your work before you deliver a website to a client. Clients – check the website after it is delivered.
Good Luck
April 24th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Additionally to this advice, if some of your pages are not getting spidered, or weird pages are ranking higher than others, you can create a search engine sitemap and submit it through the google webmaster tools. Just do a search for “Google Webmaster Tools” to find more info about that. Thanks for this info.