Yesterday I wrote about the benefits a website visitor experience when a site has been done with valid HTML. Now it’s time for the benefits for the person or persons building the website.
Personal Benefits of Validating HTML
It’s the case of hear me now, believe me later. As I mentioned in the first post of this series, many are very defensive about not validating. The only reason I can guess why is because it just means more work, and they have never tried.
I have two things to say about that. First, it’s easier than you think, and second, once you get in the habit, you won’t see it as extra work. Below are the reasons why.
Avoid Formatting Mistakes
Validating often helps you find elements that were nested incorrectly. A missing DIV could really mess up the layout of your site. If your site was validated before the new omission, finding the error would be a snap. Just validate again, and W3C will tell you where you messed up.
For this reason alone, you can, and I have as well, save lots of time. Once your site is valid, it’s easy to keep valid. I could easily stop listing benefits here. Return on time invested is 99.9% guaranteed.
Improve Your SEO
I mentioned the ALT attribute for defining images yesterday. Not only is it good for your users, it can be great for you. By defining your image with an accurate description you could gain thousands of visitors.
I have one site that gets nearly 500 hits a day from Google on just one page. Why? It’s the image description in the ALT attribute. The site gets other image hits as well. I spent about 30 minutes validating that site. Well worth the time I say. Need another reason?
Learn Something New
Want to learn HTML? Learning how to validate is a great way to keep up with new technology, and new methods for building websites.
Are you ready for HTML version 5? This site is. I just need to change one line of code. By regularly visiting W3C I get insight to the future of web development, and you can too!
Take the Advantage
Another item I mentioned yesterday is that validating is a strong step in the right direction for improving accessibility. That’s great for the user, but what about you? Well, know that most websites are not being validated. If you have a competitor that could be great news for you. You could even take that extra time validating, and turn it into a selling point.
A great example of this is phone usage. Sites developed with valid HTML often work well on cell phones or PDA’s. Can your competitors site?
Spend Less Time Testing
Saving the best for last. We all hate spending time testing websites. How many browsers do you need to test your site with anyhow? Right now there are about 80 versions of browsers being used. Are you going to test them all? I’m not, and I do this stuff for a living. Those 80 by the way do not include all the different kinds of cell phone browsers out there.
You should always test your site to see how it looks in different browsers, but testing them all is just not practical. By validating your HTML you can know how your site looks on most browsers.
This is the third and final part of a three part post about why it’s important to validate you code. You can find the first of this three part article here: Reasons Why Validating HTML is Important to You.
ariel (1)
Chris (1)
Curtis (1)
Great tips. I think most of us do not have a habit of validating HTML. I think its is very important that we inculcate this habit as a small missing closing tag can also create a lot of issue
Why is it that most people don’t do this. It is one of the most simple things to do to help your site.
They don’t see the immediate return trying to fix a site. If you start a new page from scratch it’s actually a faster way to build a site.
yea that would be faster.
thanks for the info, I am setting up a new blog and didn’t realize I need to do this.
AlT text helps image bots to know what type of image it but i don’t use it because traffic from image is worthless.
Usually visitors from Google Image Search are not that good because they’re looking just for that image and not really interested in your content. Maybe it is just me but when I look for image I look for images and nothing else.
There is not enough websites that even consider validating their site. I have noticed alot of links to HTML, CSS validation services claiming their websites have been coded with no errors, only when i clicked the links to the validation service it said there was errors. Short mistakes can lead into a few negative bursts that are not needed.