We run across improperly coded sites every single day and having that developer in me, I want to fix ALL of them! Sadly, I can’t just hack in and fix all the errors I see, so I’ll just have to be satisfied with making sure our clients have error-free websites!
Websites with coding errors are like sick websites. Something just isn’t right and until it is righted, it’s just not going to work properly. Symptoms may include the obvious broken page elements and layout, slow load times, lack of search-ability, browser incompatibilities and more (if your computer starts literally sneezing… run, because it is definitely NOT supposed to do that).
Most of the time these errors can be identified by running the w3c validator on a site to see what errors it catches, though not all of these issues can be caught that way. I’ve run into nightmare sites with hundreds and hundreds of errors and that is typically when I advise a complete rebuild instead of trying to fix the errors.
Run the test on your site and make sure you clear all out the errors. Your site will run better and the major search engines will be able to read and index it better too. Some sites have so many errors, they aren’t searchable by search engines, while some are searchable, but only partially. If search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing cannot read your website, they cannot list your website or if they do, you will not rank high. Should you wish to be found in search engines, ensure your search-ability is top-notch or you may be wasting your SEO efforts or budget.
One of the most common problems websites run into is browser incompatibilities. HTML is a language and web browsers interpret that language. The trick is many of these browsers interpret various HTML/CSS elements differently than other browsers. Having a website work and display properly in all major browsers can be quite difficult and is one of the key elements of a professionally built website. These browser inconsistencies aren’t always the result of actual errors, but there are specific techniques that just do not always produce the same results in all browsers, so you’ll have to watch for that and make sure your site looks right in at least Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
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