I might harp on about good quality code quite a lot but there are lots of very good reasons. When buying a website it’s easy to get swept away with great design or go for a low budget option or to design in-house Either way, initially at least, most will judge the website based upon the look only. Often completely overlooking the code *under the hood*.
So what can good code do for my website?
- Search engine friendly. Your website will be more likely to be found in search engines like Google – meaning more visitors, potentially leading to more sales.
- Accessible. A well coded website should be accessible to those with different size monitors, software, hardware and to people of all abilities. Not only is there a legal and moral obligation to ensure that the website can be viewed, it will also increase your customer base.
- Cross browser compatible. Ok so you only use one computer and one browser to surf the internet but your visitors have a wide array of different applications. Some are using browsers 10 years old and other are bang up to date. Your website should downgrade gracefully, meaning that it could take advantage of new features but still display nicely without them on the older browsers.
- Fast loading times. How annoying is it when you have to wait for the page to load? Perhaps there is a big spinning image on the screen to remind you to wait? Your customers wont want to wait. Coded in the right way your website pages should be light and fast to download.
- Easy to update. Did you know that if your website is coded correctly that you should be able to do simple thing like changing the banner on every page in just one line of code? Changing the background color or image should just be a a few strokes of the keyboard. If your website is not well coded then you could end up paying for a lot of development time should you want to have it redesigned in the future.
If you are buying a website then please do ask your designer how it will be coded. Ideally you are looking for a website written in XHMTL/CSS and absolutely not table driven. (I don’t need to go into the actual technicalities too much but essentially a well coded website treats the content in one file and the design in another. Table driven websites tend to mingle the two together leading to long, slow, unreadable and hard to update pages).
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