It has occurred to me that a great deal of the sites I come across are stressing the importance of having good coding and a user friendly site, and yet so many of the premade website and blogging systems (don’t even get me started on MySpace) seem to completely ignore this. Now, I know that many people don’t see the point of following web standards, and at some level I understand this view, coding is made for displaying web sites, so if it displays what you want it to, it’s good, right?

Well, that’s not exactly right. Think of your coding as the foundation of your house, where the house is your website. The foundation can be bad and the house will still look good, but sooner or later something will fall apart. There are many good reasons to use proper coding, but you can read about those in lots of other places, so I thought I’d mention some more unusual reasons to focus on coding and accessibility in general:

• It’s amazingly good for your self-esteem when you get that green bar on the page showing that your site is valid, I really recommend trying it
• It shows that you take an interest in creating a good website, not just for you, but to cater for your visitors as well
• When you use CSS, the look of the different parts of your site are connected in a special way, and sometimes you have to find new ways of doing things in order to make each element look as you want. This can actually be fun, and very rewarding when you make it work!
• Separating the content from the design can make it easier to focus on how you want your site to be, and it can inspire you to come up with new design ideas, because you can change the design with a few extra lines of CSS
• The last but very important point: it’s good for your geek factor.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Current issues, Technology, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.