WC3 Compliant pages and site

[mryang]

Hi everyone,

My home page on Blank dvd disc and case products for duplication and replication. I am really struggling to make it fully WC3 compliant, basically I am using the reporting tools in Dreamweaver to analyse the page and then will move onto the reast of the site. Do you think I am wasting my time or is it actually worth doing?? And is it possible to realistically achieve easily?

[incrediblehelp]

Not necessary for rankings, but still a good idea from a development point of view.

[Rod Abbotson]

This is designed "old school" as was my own site when I relied on third parties. You will find many opinions on this from both sides all claiming that you should do this and that etc What is better what is not and whether is WC3 compliance matters on search engine optimization.
Personally I though the well if the W3C recommends something its usualy in the best interests of all parties, although I sure some will vehemently argue that one. I had arguements with several pro web designers on many issues - some seems to stuck in there ways and do not like change - I have this same problem in my industry - recreational scuba diving - these dinos die out REALLY!

As a new kid on the block I recoded my site all to XHTML 1.0 Strict using CSS, a lot of work but worth it - I had to throw away dreamweaver/frontpage etc as they all seem to generate lots of unecessary code and do everthing on notepad. This is actually easier after you get used to it. Handcode on notepad and then open in different browsers to see what is happening.

I am now trying to get rid of all the table layouts on my website and use CSS for layout as well as all the other presentational info. Ive only done the home page so far but it actually now loads 3 times quicker than it did in tables and its image heavy!

My google position was greatly improved once I made my site validate with W3C as xhtml 1.0 strict

Also submting a site map to google helps, it will be now interesting to see what happens to Yahoo now microsoft have hold of it!

Main problem I have now is just on IE6/IE7/Mozilla?Opera and various screen resolutions, I test in these browers only at the moment seems to cover most.

My site design is considered crap by most web developers, but it is aimed at my particular diving market so it should have a home/family friendly look and not gret big corporate site look.
I will be changing the design slowly so as not to put off my regular client base - continuity is important - a rival company of mibne completely changed their site and subsequently lost all business depite the new sit being infinately better than the old one design wise.


check out my site but have a look at the coding (right click and view source) and you can see what Ive done much to the chagrin of pro designers!

Ok Im going diving again!


Dive Aqaba - PADI Dive Center - Red Sea - Jordan

Rod

[mryang]

Nice clean code Rod. But do you think it really made a difference to your google rankings?

[Webnauts]

As long your code errors don't choke the crawlers, it must be fine.

[Rod Abbotson]

Originally Posted by mryang

Nice clean code Rod. But do you think it really made a difference to your google rankings?

Probably right as I have been optomizing the site in various other ways. Submiting site map to google probably did more, difficult to say. I did notice more of a difference when I changed from xhtml transitional doctype to strict, but again I was working on the accessibilty thing as well.
The title tags in the head seem to do more than anything and making them relevant to the page content especially h1 headings. At one point I took all the description and keyword meta tags out,
this made no difference, although everyone thought I was nuts! I have since put description meta tags back on all the pages, this actually made a difference on how the text info appeared on google (after the page titles) as sometimes it just displayed here the main nav tags which looked naff!

Luckily I am in a relatively specialised market so do not get much variation on words that people type in for a search mainly competing with a small number of local competitors whose websites are all crap. they dont attach any importance to them! I have actually doubled my business by revamping the site so Ill keep working on it! At the moment trying to do all the layout without tables,a page at a time so far done two pages! Only another 251 to go! This makes a difference on my load time. I am also lucky in just having one site to maintain!

Rod

[kgun]

Originally Posted by mryang

Hi everyone,

My home page on Blank dvd disc and case products for duplication and replication. I am really struggling to make it fully WC3 compliant, basically I am using the reporting tools in Dreamweaver to analyse the page and then will move onto the reast of the site. Do you think I am wasting my time or is it actually worth doing?? And is it possible to realistically achieve easily?

1. By reporting tools in Dreamweaver, do you mean the "Check Page" tools that is found on the File menu? That menu has its own markup validator, acessibility tester, target browser tester etc.
2. Validating can in most cases not hurt. That does not mean that that will guarantee the best code. I assume that validation improves your code, looking for open and non properly nested tags, non XHTML well-formedness etc.
3. I see that you use a lot of JavaScript in your code. Example: _wp=_W.createPopup; Does that mean that you use pop ups on your site? If those pop ups are implemented in the wrong way, it my hurt your rankings. Generally, I personally, do not recommend pop ups and in some cases it will prevent me from linking to the site, depending on how pushy the pop ups are.
4. Since you use JavaScript and you most probably look at your site in FF, IE and Opera, you should perhaps use FireBug to improve / debug your JavaScript code.

General advice: Instead of pushing events (like pop ups) on a surfer, give her / him an option to choose.