Growing Perceptions

Content management systems and automated web page builders provide simple interfaces which allow everyday individuals to develop full scale websites. These applications seemingly eliminate the need to hire a web developer to create a professional online presence.

These applications usually do a decent job formatting the overall look and feel of each web page, however, they do typically produce very poorly structured code. The overall HTML, Javascript, and CSS produced by these programs does not come close to following W3C standards (W3C is the organization which develops and specifies web standards and guidelines – http://www.w3.org/). This fault is easily overlooked since the audience which utilizes these applications is not exposed to the web page coding and would never be able to make any sense of the script.

A website with poorly produced script cannot develop into a successful online identity. While most web surfers are concerned only with the appearance and content of web pages, search engines are concerned only with the code and content relevance. Search engines are tripped up by ill-written code and are likely to ignore the web page or website as a whole.

I am currently working on a 4 page website previously developed by a Yahoo content management system. The client is interested in Search Engine Optimizing their webpages. As a result, I will begin by cleaning up the code. Each page seems to require several hours simply to disect its original diluted script. A great deal of time and money could have been saved if an experienced web developer was consulted before website construction began.

Content Management Systems do allow everyday individuals to produce presentable websites, however they greatly reduce the websites visibility to the online community.