HTML Validation

What is HTML and why validate it?

HTML is the language of the internet. Every web page is built using this language and describes the content and the layout of the page. Every browser interprets this language to display the result of those instructions hopefully in the way the designer intended.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. Not all browsers are created equal and there are a lot of browsers in common use.

There are a number of reasons we recommend ensuring all the pages of your website are fully validated (and to a high standard – we’ll talk about standards another day). These are the biggies:

• Invalid code may prevent search engines from accessing all of your content and therefore impact on your ranking
• Invalid code may be interpreted inconsistently by some Browsers, which can impact on the look or functionality of your site and, therefore, the way some users interact with it.

Does this make it more expensive to build my page?

If we build your website there will not be any additional cost to make your pages valid. When we build a website we make sure all the HTML is valid during the building process, it’s not an extra step that takes time and therefore adds cost.

If we are doing a makeover of an existing website, it will take us time to correct any validation errors and therefore it will add to the cost. How much cost will depend on how much time is required. We have a lot of experience in this process and we can generally correct all or at least the most significant of the errors in around 2 hours per page.

Assessing the validity of your pages is easy. Just visit W3C Markup Validation Service and put in the url for the pages you wish to validate. If you need help interpreting the results, why don’t you contact us.