The importance of having good web coding is as important as having a solid building foundation. A building with poor foundation might look good and stand proud and tall now but when storms or earthquakes hit, will it withstand the beatings?

It is true that some browsers will try to display them even if the code is not valid. What happens is the browser will make an educated guess about what the web developer tried to do. The problem is, different browsers and browser versions or different software on different platforms will not handle errors the same way.

This can result to the following:

• What you see may not render on another user’s computer.
• slow page loading time and even systems crashes
• Higher maintenance cost because it may take longer to update your website. Using internationally agreed upon codes makes maintaining and expanding your website easier even if it was initially done by someone else.
• Many visually impaired people rely on browsers with speech tools that read pages back to them. These programs cannot interpret pages very well unless they are clearly explained. In other words semantic code aids accessibility.

So even if your site ranks no.1 on Google search for your keywords today, if your page doesn’t load or makes a mangled mess, then what use that it serve? Nothing but big opportunities LOST!

How will I know if my site is properly coded?

There are a number of tools available online to validate your web codes. Among them are W3C Validation service, MarkUp Validator, Link Checker and CSS Validator. But the best way is to simply look at the code and seeing if it refers to colours, fonts or layout instead of describing what the content is.