Chances are that if you’ve taken a few courses are been employed to design a website for a decent size organization that you’ve heard about the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is ” an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.” The W3C provides a standard for several web coding languages like HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, etc.

The W3C provides a validator that makes sure the code you write adheres to a standard. When designing a web page it isn’t necessary to make sure the code adheres to these standards, but there are some benefits. For one, if you are looking for a job in web design, potential employers will be more impressed with code that clean and proper than sloppy with unclosed tags.

There’s a couple of reasons for that. Consider that your potential boss and coworkers will either have to edit your page(s) when you are working there or after you leave. If you really wanted to, you could write a web site in one line. Wouldn’t that be fun to edit?

Even if you’re thinking that nobody but you will edit your pages validation is important. Why? Consider what the W3C has to say about it:

Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury?
Even if you can, do you want to risk being on the wrong side of a lawsuit if your site proves inaccessible to – for instance – a disabled person who cannot use a ‘conventional’ browser? Accessibility is the law in many countries. Whilst validation doesn’t guarantee accessibility (there is no substitute for common sense), it should be an important component of exercising “due diligence”. It is now just over a year since a court first awarded damages to a blind user against the owners of a website he found inaccessible (Maguire vs SOCOG, August 2000).

Still not convinced? Well if the threat of being sued just isn’t enough how about not being able to make money in the first place? See good coding is one of the ways Google distinguishes your web site, from a spam site. Good sites are more relevant for users, and therefore higher on the search rankings.

Now hopefully at this point you realize just how important it is to validate. But what is valid code? Well, the long answer is here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-structure-presentation but for most people here’s a list of things to get you started:

(ignore the p tag, its apparently a WordPress error)

Questions? Shout out in the comments and I will try to answer them.