Interestingly I was looking at Twitter earlier today and tried to add one of my competitors to my ‘friends’, nothing wrong with friendly competition after all. I was somewhat surprised to discover that they had blocked me. I didn’t really know that much about them so I went to look at their company website. At the bottom of which they had those nifty icons saying that their site was valid HTML 4.0, needless to say they are always a proverbial red rag to a bull to someone like me so I promptly pressed it and was somewhat staggered that their site came up with some 100 plus errors. I am proud to say that this one currently validates as xhtml 1.0 strict. Check it out if you don’t believe me here.
Anyway it got me thinking. How important is validation these days? There are a number of reasons why I try to make our sites valid:
- It implies we know what we are doing, now anybody and his dog can create websites with no formal qualifications it is a sign of some professionalism
- It helps to ensure that your site is viewable in all browsers as you would like it to be seen
- Means the site is more likely to be future proof
- The site is easier to maintain, especially if a site is to be maintained by someone different than the designer
Having said that not all of our sites are completely valid. Since we started designing using free Content Management Systems, most notably Joomla and Wordpress this has had a marked difference to the competitive nature of our prices (a basic site for as little as £100 up to £2000 for an ecommerce site). We are able to be so competitive partly because we are based in Peru and partly because much of the advanced functionality that in the past we would have coded ourselves we can now find in the form of extensions for the chosen CMS. These extensions are remarkably inexpensive if not free (we always make a small donation when we use them for clients) however sometimes these components may not be valid. Normally our clients budget does not allow for the additional cost of making sure everything is valid.
Ultimately it is not the end of the world if a site is completely invalid, but when looking for a designer I would always recommend seeing if their sites validate and if not to ask them why not!
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Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
Yes of course!