“A good-looking website that has been hand-coded and built to the latest web-standards with usability in mind will reap dividends and could mean the different between success and failure for your online adventure.”
The above is a quote from my blog post entitled “Choosing a Website Designer - Ten Tips” that I posted a couple of days ago. Today, I am going to give an explanation as to why websites should be hand-coded.
To the untrained eye, they will not know whether their website has been hand-coded or whether it was a template website or made in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software. So what’s the fuss you might ask. The fuss is that Search Engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc) don’t care what your website looks like. They don’t care about the fancy use of colour or the stunning photos you have on your website. They care about the “construction” of the website, how the website was built. After all, if a search engine doesn’t “rate” your website then nobody will be able to find it.
Hand-coded websites are suited to companies that want a top quality website and value their investment in a professional image. Hand coding does not rely on pre-built templates or WYSIWYG software, so the website designer/developer has ultimate control over the code that structures the website. The layout of the website is constructed with CSS and HTML rather than tables, which allows for a much more flexible design.
Website design updates and changes are quick and easy in CSS layouts because design attributes are shared across pages and controlled from style sheets. Also, pages are much more search engine friendly because there is no extraneous HTML code for the search engine spider to sort through in front of the web page content. This increases the chances of having your website ranking highly for your targeted keywords on the search engines.
Reduced HTML mark-up also provides much faster download times for all users, but especially those that are using dial-up internet connections or mobile devices to browse the Internet.
Hand-coded websites also provide improved accessibility for people using assistive technologies to browse the internet by adding elements such as link titles and “alt” attributes to images. The reduced mark-up also makes navigating much easier for this group of users.
If you need a website developed and are sourcing quotes, ask each website designer if they hand-code the websites they make. This brings another dimension to when you are comparing quotes.
For example, just say you have two quotes from two different website designers and you have been quoted £500 by both of the website designers. Now imagine that one says they hand-code websites and the other says they use WYSIWYG software. Well, when you think about the benefits of hand-coded websites over template and WYSIWYG software made websites, you will realise that the quote for £500 from the website designer who does hand-code websites is a lot better VALUE. You get a lot more bang for your buck both now and in the future.