The Significance Of Clean Markup In Website Development

By Author: Dheeaj Prakash
Total Articles: 70
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The area of web development is expanding every day. New innovations appear everyday and it is important that your business can accommodate the new trends. You will want a website that can build and grow with the trends and can withstand new trends without folding when new technologies arise.

When I talk about new technologies, I specifically mean new writing language. A lot of older websites have been made with HTML but HTML5 is on the horizon and other languages have developed as well, for example:

Javascript
CSS
XML
AJAX

For your business website to survive, you need to take into account that there are other languages available to you and web browsers already support the above languages and they are readying themselves for the embracement of HTML5.

So, What is Clean Mark Up?

Some developers have wrongly assumed that Clean Markup means the reduction of tags in your website. What actually means is:

1. Making your website standards-compliant with W3C for HTML, CSS and XML
2. Clutter free
3. Accommodating the tags and structures of each language
4. ...
... Avoiding wasteful attributes
5. Keeping documents structured and fully organized.
6. Reusing classes of CSS to reduce clutter
7. Testing for errors and correcting until you are as valid as you can possibly be.

Why is Clean Markup Significant?

It is significant because a lot of developers are on strict deadlines. They may try and cut corners to make sure that your site is up on time. You don’t want this to happen. You want your site to be up and working on time, but you want the site to last a long time. If the developer has cut corners with the Markup of their code, then you may find that your site does not survive the language changes in the future. It may not even survive the introduction of new browsers.

If you are a person who has used the different browsers, such as FireFox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, you will know that websites look different depending on the browser. You will also know that some websites are not accessible via Safari. Your code should account for all the different web browsers.

Future Proofing

Publishing a website means that your site will be around for a very long time. Even, if you take your website down, the website will still be accessible via the Internet Archive. It will be a representative of your business so the code of your website has to be future proof so it will look the way it was intended to look, in the future.

Mobile Browsing

Your code has to account for Mobile browsing. More and more people use mobile devices like Cell phone and tablets to access websites. Your website has to look professional on a mobile device. You will lose a lot of business if your site is not accessible from a mobile device. A good developer uses good markup, so the site can be seen on a mobile device and that too without glitches.

Accessibility

Clean Markup can mean that your site can offer extra accessibility features for people with disabilities. You are risking the loss of traffic and the loss of sales if you don’t make the site accessible to the handicapped. You could have a developer add code for different devices with a friendlier interface and screen readers for people who have issues with the site. Also, keep in mind that your site should be translated easily across many different languages

SEO and How it Matters to Clean Markup

A Clean Markup will mean that your page is very light. Your page will have an increase in page content to markup ratio, which means it will feature higher up on search engine pages. For example, if a user searches for a keyword which features on your site, if your page has less code, it will rank higher in the search engine results. Crawlers will be able to read your page more efficiently.

Therefore, Clean Markup can mean the difference between having a successful website and a website that gets lost among the sea of other websites. A developer that cuts corners in order to get your site up faster is not what you should be looking for. A developer that may take longer but will ensure the code has a good markup will be better for your business in the long run.

Ideazinc is a leading web design agency located in New delhi that offers impeccable website development services and innovative digital solutions.