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” Hmm… Looks like some deprecated code to me, “ I said quietly to my friends from Morrill Technology Group during a recent group meeting to determine pricing for reworking a prospective client’s site for organic search engine optimization.
You would have thought I’d have said something scandalous, obscene, or just plain funny with the snorts and chuckles I heard from Victor Morrill so I asked him what was so funny.
He thought I had said “defecated code” rather than “deprecated code”. Naturally I laughed…and laughed even more… Well, with all of us in the meeting being parents from the Diaper Genie generation, the conversation digressed to the “diaper sausages” from the Diaper Genies.
Oops… Let me get back on track… Hold that thought about defecated code and the Diaper Genie for later…
Deprecated code really could be viewed as “defecated” code, because with the onset of style sheets, there shouldn’t be any font or bgcolor tags in your site’s code. According to the widely-accepted html standards established by the world wide consortium (http://www.w3.org), deprecated code, such as font or bgcolor tags, should no longer be used in website page coding.
Giraffe Web only designs websites that conform to the w3c standards, because we want our sites–YOUR 24/7 marketing vehicle and business card to the WORLD–to have every chance of being viewing correctly across multiple browsers. What this means is that we want your target audience to view your site in the way that it is intended, regardless of the browser used. Additionally, we also review and run every line of code in your site through the validator tools available at the w3c’s site (http://validator.w3.org/) before uploading new code to your site’s server. This is like another level of insurance for making your site as effective as possible.
Why do we check and recheck your site’s code for errors? In plain and simple terms, errors in the code of your website pages can cost you business.
Errors in your site’s code can cause the search engines to stop crawling your site, or not crawl it correctly. If the search engines cannot or will not crawl your site, your site will not show up well in the search engine queries by your prospective clients or customers.
You should know that many web designers do NOT bother to review and validate your site’s code against the w3c codes. Many web designers simply don’t care enough to write code that allows sites to be viewed correctly across multiple browsers.
Here’s a case in point… I was in a recent advisory meeting at a local technical school, and we we were discussing the needs of Upstate businesses regarding website development. We wanted to make sure that the school could make certain they were focusing on teaching the correct classes to accommodate the community needs. One of the school advisors had the audacity to say, “We can get a web designer anywhere – a dime a dozen – but we need JAVA and ASP.NET programmers. We have standards we have to meet.” This is a common misconception by most everyone because web designers have standards they have to meet, but most of them don’t bother.
In a perfect world in which all web designers write all of their html code to standards, all sites would be crawled regularly and correctly by all of the search engines, resulting in websites having good ranking with Google, Yahoo, et. al.
If current and prospective customers can always find your site in the search engines, you have a better chance of strengthening the profitability of existing customer relationships and building new relationships.
Giraffe Web is ready to help you develop a site for you that complies with standards.
We want to help you grow your business… Not throw away precious working capital on sites that don’t work.
If you are curious about whether your website is coded correctly, run your site’s pages through the validator at w3c: http://validator.w3.org/.
If you are a Giraffe Web client, rest assured that all of your pages will validate. But hey, feel free to try out the validator anyway.
If you’re not a Giraffe Web client, you better get that Diaper Genie out of storage… just in case…
Cheers,
Judy
This is what happens when web designers treat page construction like word processing or DTP. Just because it looks good in Internet Exploder 5.5 doesn’t make it so. You have to understand how the mechanics of the Web work to make it work for you. Giraffe does.
Its seriously surprising how many people dont run the validator. Im glad you touched on that in this post. And people can always get programmers a dime a dozen, too bad thats all their worth…