There’s a saying which has great resonance in the IT industry – ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!’

In many cases, this is the best approach to developing and maintaining computer software. If the system is working, performing it’s required functions correctly, and  there is no business requirement to make corrections, then the cost-benefit equation definitely falls down on the side of leaving well enough alone. Changing a computer system, even slightly, can be costly, requires testing, and always runs the risk of causing unforeseen impacts. All developers know that a misplaced full stop can cause a program to run riot, causing  untold chaos, before coming to it’s ‘logical’ end in a crash! 

However, let’s take a look again at the business requirement. If your business has a web site and one of your requirements is to attract traffic, that is, you want to be found by search engines, and ranked highly in their results, then your web site must be build with underlying technology that the search engines can ’crawl’ effectively and index the content of.

Many older websites were built using ‘frames’, this is now an out-dated technology, as search engines cannot access the data, therefore they cannot index it, and your business will not be returned in results. Your site can also run into problems if the underlying code with which it’s written is not completely valid. It may appear to look alright, but if the code is not up to current standards, then the search engines may not read it correctly – and you lose out.

To see if your code meets current standards of XHTML, you can run your code through a validator. All you have to do is go to Validator.W3.org and type in your URL (web site address). It will then read through to see how ‘clean’ your code is.

If you see lots of errors, so will Google’s bots!

Note:    a ‘bot‘, while it sounds like a new strain of bacteria, is actually a piece  of software that fulfils a task, over and over again, a bit like a robot.

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