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Valid Website Code – A Story from an Adult Web Designer

This is a story about web pages that are written in a language called HTML or XHTML.

These pages consist of text or images placed inside tags that relay information to the browser on how it is to be displayed. Most web sites incorporate an external style sheet to define these tags that tell the browser where things should be and how they should look on the web page. This style sheet is commonly referred to as a CSS (cascading style sheet). One or more style sheets can be used for the same website, depending on the design of the site.

In HTML, designers have the ability to use lots of inline styling. That means inserting style rules into the tags on the page instead of using the external style sheet.

With XHTML, which you can think of as HTML’s newer and more streamlined brother, most styling must be done in the style sheet. I currently design all sites using XHTML 1.0 transitional.

Messy pages

During the website design process, all this code can start to get cluttered. Sometimes a designer will put a page together, then need to change one element, but instead of doing so by adding a rule to the style sheet, we add the style rule to the tag on the web page itself. It’s a shortcut that most designers use now and then but too many of them make your code messy. Web sites designed in HTML are especially prone to this, as it doesn’t require the stricter rules of XHTML.

What’s the problem with messy code? When search engines crawl your site, they have to wade through more information than necessary to get to your text. This can greatly hurt SEO (search engine ranking). Semantic code is minimalistic, with little to no inline styling. All of the style rules are determined by your style sheet, so your code stands out more clearly. All the better for search engines to find you.

Valid code

There’s also the issue of invalid code. Sure, it’s entirely possible that your site can display properly in most browsers with code that doesn’t validate through the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, the gurus in charge of website coding). Validating code is the responsibility of the web designer. Still, some incredible designers overlook this step. Run your website through the validator link above and see what you find. You may be pleasantly…or unpleasantly surprised.

For some time there’s been a debate as to whether valid code makes a difference to SEO. Our research indicates that while valid pages don’t necessarily help SEO, invalid pages can hurt it. Search engines can trip up on errors in your code, ignore whole chunks of your page and thus not indexing them. If that chunk includes links to other pages on your site, that will definitely impact your SEO for the worse.

The verdict?

I can not tolerate invalid code. Regardless of any possible consequences of having messy, invalid code, it just offends me. Maybe I’m a perfectionist. So every website I design is guaranteed to validate. I will not have it any other way!

Since I’m neurotic about code being valid, I offer a code clean-up service. The price per page varies according to your site, generally from $5-$30 per page, depending on how much work needs to be done. If I can’t get the page to validate, you get a full refund. Simple! If you have an adult website or any type of site and this service interests you, please visit adult website services for more information.

Anyone with a little HTML knowledge is capable of turning invalid code pristine. If your first run through validator shows 70 errors, don’t panic! Start at the top of the error list and work your way down. Many times, multiple errors will disappear when you fix the preceding problem. It takes some time and patience but it can be done. I was able to get the code on my first website to validate before I hardly even knew what I was doing. Don’t despair!