For Online Results, Code Matters More Than Design

Before we meet with a new client, most have already spent some time looking at our portfolio. They inevitably comment on the clean look and intuitive design, complimenting us on how professional and simple to navigate our web sites are.

Great design is easy to recognize, but what about great code? Sometimes I wonder if construction companies feel the same way after building a beautiful house and the Architect takes all the credit for their visionary design.

Clean <code /> makes a difference

You may not know it, but good code is more important then a good design for getting results on the internet. Well-written, standards-compliant semantic code allows the search engines to see more of your sites content, helping you get to the top of the search engines.

Getting found online

The Internet is vast; in 2007 there were over 108 million distinct web sites online. Being found in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN will determine your site's success.

So it’s crucial that search engines only see information relevant to what you want to get found for. A poorly coded tables based website buries your site's content in a slew of extra code. Designing to standards using Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, can reduce the amount of code needed to display a page by almost a third, making it load faster and be easier for the search engines to read.

Ignore the code, and you'll be buried among the millions of sites out there, invisible to your customers.

Look at the page source for this page, and you’ll notice that the relevant, easy to read content is at the top of the page, and most of the code falls at the bottom of the page. This makes all the difference in the world to the search engines. Less code means more content.

Under the hood

At Primal Media, we code to standards in XHTML/CSS, PHP, and MySQL. This makes our sites fast loading, easier to maintain, and future-proof. We also believe passionately in Open Source technologies, using Drupal as our primary content management system (CMS) and Ubercart for our e-commerce applications.

Did your eyes glaze over? Wondering how this matters to you? The reason is simple: coding to standards can make or break your business.

You'll like our code, too

How do you know it's good? Well, one of our clients, Longbow, wanted assurance that their web site had been coded well, so they had an independent board of SEO Professionals review our code at the 2008 ACCM Conference.

The leader was Heather Lloyd-Martin, CEO of SuccessWorks International and “the pioneer of SEO copywriting”. They went digging in the code, looking at keyword density, site navigation and headlines. It got very good reviews from both a marketing perspective and a code perspective. Looking at the code they said, "they absolutely knew what we were doing."

It’s a really cool thing when your code gets praised by SEO professionals.

What to look for

Unfortunately, we can't work with everyone, so I've included some helpful tips to consider when shopping for you next web site.

• Do they code in CSS or tables? If they answer tables, you should find a way to leave the meeting immediately.
• Do they code in house, or is it done by a third party? For technical reasons it is essential that the developer be involved in the design process. Web designers can get carried away and promise things to a client that are technical, impossible, or add significant time to the project.
• Meet both the coder(s) and the designer(s)! Make sure you like both of them, because after your project launches you will probably be talking to the developer(s) about making upgrades to your site. Even if your working through a sales person or a Customer Service Rep, try to have a discussion with both the design and development team before signing off on a project.
• Do their sites come up high in Google for specific keywords? Test a few of their sites to see what kind of results you get. If you can't find them, you don't want them.
• How fast do their sites load? Fast page load is essential. People will only wait a few seconds, and if your web site hasn't loaded by then they move onto the next one. A site can have slower load times if it's graphic aren't optimized or if it is coded poorly. Keep in mind that a site can still look good, but take forever to load because it wasn't done right.
• Is the designer also the developer? Designing an effective web page is a very left brain activity. Programming a web site is almost entirely right brain. For someone to be exceptional at both, they would have to be one of those Leonardo da Vinci types.

Perhaps the best advice I can give you is when you find a good coder, make sure they know how much you appreciate them. A bottle of red or a heartfelt thanks. After all, where would the Internet be without us?