Tonight I did a search (using Google) for the term web design cleveland ohio just to see how many of the top organically ranked sites were standards compliant.
I made sure I was logged out of Google, ignored the paid links and didn’t count the local business results offered. I also tried to check that all the companies were actually in the Cleveland area too.
So how many passed the mustard?
One - Emit Design. They were the only one that passed validation out of the 9 listed (one firm came up twice using two different URL’s).
Now I don’t know anyone at Emit (as far as I know) and I can’t say I’m a big fan of the design but the code is a joy to behold next to some of their page one companions including this one that has 85 errors after I had to suggest HTML4 Trans (they hadn’t specified a DOCTYPE) and changed the encoding to iso-8859-1 because the validator choked using the UTF-8 they had specified as they were using non-UTF-8 characters.
So what was the point of my search?
Well, I wanted to look at a few of things:
- does using standards guarantee high organic rankings?
- how many Cleveland companies are actually coming close to validation?
- what are the types of things that are tripping people up?
No is obviously the answer to question number one judging by the nine I got back. But then I’ve never thought it would. I believe using standards does help in getting your pages crawled more easily & thoroughly but SEO is more than just getting crawled nowadays. It’s relvancy, history, meta data, links and a whole lot of other arcane things. By the same token this shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to code with standards.
Answer to question two, I’m happy to report, is quite a few. Four out of the nine had under 10 errors. Mainly around the 3-5 range:
The others fell in the OMG! range. 31, 43 and 11 as well as the aforementioned 85.
Question three’s answer is STUPID SHIT THAT IS EASY TO FIX! Now there a few things that I let slip when validating sites such as the .NET’s viewstate and some of the crap when you drop FLASH in a page. These are accommodation’s made because of time constraints in business. But not closing tags or missing alt attributes - c’mon people! Even Dreamweaver and Visual Studio can catch these things for you.
And then there’s using <font> tags along with on-page CSS and tables for layout - yes I’m looking at you MJM Design.
So apart from winding me up and making me seem like a zealot, will this post bother these companies? Probably not. I mean, they are on the first page of Google for that search term and probably get some business from it, but I think it should (my freelance web design site is on page two for the same term and I get none) . I know a couple of people that work for some of these firms and they do good work. The look and feel of a lot of these sites are good too. But this isn’t a blog about how pretty a site is.
Using the W3C standards and being aware of the general web development practices that are used now is what makes you a professional in this arena. And this blog is all about promoting that in Cleveland. That’s why I wrote this. Fix the small stuff, step up and say that it matters to your bosses and to your clients.
Then again, if it did bother them enough to fix it, I may not have much to write about.
Sites looked at were:
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Tags: standards, failure, cleveland, firms
