A valid website means W3C valid web pages

What is a valid web site? Is a valid web site important? How to validate a web site or why validate?

What makes a website valid and why design a web site that validates to W3C markup standards?

Before writing this valid site, our business designers attempted to validate web pages from 100 different professional web site design and search engine optimization or SEO firms. Using the search terms; website designers, design good web sites and professional web design as search input phrases in several search engines, we performed a formal validation test on at least the top ten list, for each search phrase ( SERP )s, from each search engine. A valid website is rare, even among website designers.

How many valid web sites are there?

We are not surprised to confirm that less than 10% validate using the FREE, W3C markup validation service. You can validate any web page on any publicly accessible site!

What is a valid web page?

To test a web page for valid markup, simply copy the url (only the www.myvalidwebsite.com - in the address bar), then press the link - to the markup validator and paste the address of the page into the input area. Press "Check" and wait for the results. You might be surprised by the number of professionally designed sites claiming to be W3C valid, that fail validation miserably! With so many graphic artists claiming to be professional web designers, it's not surprising that business owners are so confused about what good web site design actually means. Validate this web page?

If a professional web site design firm won't, or can't, follow the W3C procedure to design valid web pages for their own site, how much professional credibility can they have? Will they care about the quality of your site? Will your site's search engine ranking results and usability really matter to them? Why would you hire a professional web site designer who doesn't play by the rules? Before you do, validate their site. You can also validate the first 100 pages of any website with the WDG HTML Validator service, another free markup validation service . There is no valid reason, that any web designers' sites won't validate. Valid web pages are necessary for good website design and an accessible website.

All SEO Website Designers web pages validate as valid XHTML 1.0. Every web page on every website we design, will validate as either valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0, (even our flash media webpages!) If you can't design a website that follows the W3C valid web page design rules, how can you call yourself a professional web site designer?

What is W3C web page validation? — Does W3C web page markup validation matter?

The World Wide Web Consortium provides very explicit technical specifications for publishing valid web pages. Most major search engines rely on proper hypertext markup to crawl, index and rank pages quickly and easily. Although most don't penalize poorly written websites very much, they probably should. Web pages that validate will usually be re-visited more often. W3C provides a free html markup validation to assist website developers and website owners maintain valid sites. Without valid web pages, your website may be completely inaccessible to people using specific browsers, or that have functional disabilities.

Using valid CSS on a valid web site is visually important

Valid cascading style sheets will allow each browser to display web pages the way they were intended to look. Since CSS1 and CSS2 are already valid W3C recommendations, there is a free validator for css from w3c, available for your use. W3C is still working on a new set of specifications for CSS3 that will hopefully be available soon. You can read about CSS3 and some of the important changes by visiting CSS3 Info Site for a good explanation.

Valid website pages will eventually rank higher

The more sophisticated the search engine, the more important valid pages on your website becomes. Every search engine organization is working to constantly improve the quality of their search results. Websites that have too many markup errors are already being de-indexed by some search engines and dropped from their databases. In the future, invalid, poor quality websites could lose ranking position in dramatic fashion. Valid web sites are very simple for search engines to crawl, index and rank. Validated web site design is your assurance of longevity at the top of the search results. You can't begin to solve your customers' problems, if they can't find your business information pages on a search engine results page! ( SERP

You should note that some search engines, place little value on valid web pages. In our opinion, this violates the premise that the world wide web was built on. However, others appear to place a high value on valid markup and give bonus ranking points for properly written, valid pages. Someday, Google may actually start to follow their own webmaster guidelines and put some real effort into formal, valid markup verification for their page ranking algorithm. But don't hold your breath!

Should wish to follow a step-by-step process for cleaning up an invalid site, see the W3C recommendations for fixing invalid websites.

A valid web site is a good business investment

A W3C standards compliant web site has some surprising benefits. A valid site is easier to maintain, upgrade, expand and therefore far less costly in the long term. Operating costs in terms of bandwidth usage, are lower due to increased efficiency. Using valid markup allows any competent person to maintain the site validation. A valid foundation means you're not dependant on any one service provider to maintain the site. Valid web pages load faster because the web browser doesn't need to compensate for poor page code. This can really help visitors to navigate around your site more quickly. A user friendly website is simply, good business.

Most company web sites are designed, re-designed and then re-designed again. Each time a new designer uses invalid markup, the process starts from scratch, or the site gets less usable and accessible with each re-write. Insisting that your site be written in valid html markup, has the important meta tags and good links, is always a good business site decision. If your site doesn't validate, a professional business web designer didn't build it.

To put valid markup into perspective:

If your company purchased a newspaper ad and the only words spelled correctly were the company name and the business owner's name, you would certainly refuse to pay for the ad.

Then why would you pay a web designer who can't write a properly spelled web page, when it can continue to embarrass your company for years?

• Valid web site design questions
• and Good web site design has a perspective
• or Find a good SEO
• FREE from W3C - More website validation tools
• Read more about all the SEO confusion
• Believing website myths and lies can be expensive.

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