Consider for a moment someone who makes wedding cakes. She carefully devotes her time to make a beautiful, well crafted and most of the time delicious cake.
Now picture that same wedding cake prepared the morning of your big day with its layers carelessly placed, cake crumbling and frosting sloppily smeared on. Sound like the dream cake you envisioned for your wedding? Hopefully not but ultimately in the end it’s still a wedding cake.
In that same sense websites are often put together carelessly and in a hurry to meet budgets, time constraints or other stumbling blocks that get in the way of a website’s development. Sure the website looks great, just the way it was shown to you in it’s mock-up but what about the part the client rarely ever sees, the code, the lifeblood of your website. Why should you care about it and why should it be validated?
“Looks fine in the browser, so there’s no reason to validate it.”
Here at Fragment we strongly disagree with that statement. In fact everyone here has a plug in installed in our Internet browser’s that will display a red X when the sites we are viewing are not validated. That little red X bothers us to no end and we are always working on getting that shiny green check to show up on the websites we develop. Rest assured though that isn’t the only reason we validate. The benefits are numerous.
- Validation acts as a future proof quality check. Meaning that the website is built in accordance with the most current Web standards, and provides a reliable guarantee that future web platforms will handle it as designed.
- A website that is error free is much more likely to be rendered correctly by all of the current web browsers and the majority of the old ones your customers still might use. Minus IE6! (Of course)
- A clean and valid site is much easier for search engine bots to read and scan. Meaning that when it comes to your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you are not putting obstacles in a search engine such as Google’s path.
- Validation is a sign of our Professionalism. Most everyone that builds websites knows that their clients will never see mistakes in the code that they write and it is very easy to skip validation all together. Making a nice and shiny validated site allows us to take pride in our work and also reflects on the quality of your website.
Unfortunately there are always instances where we cannot fully validate a website due to things we don’t make like plug-ins such as flash videos, Google map directions or Facebook add-on’s but all of the code we conjure up here at fragment is pretty, clean and valid.
Learn more about... Web Design, Application Development, Search Engine Optimization
