We take the cleanliness and careful planning of a website’s code very seriously. While it is true that a poorly coded site can be made to look more or less the same to the front-end user there are countless reasons why it still makes sense to find somebody who will take the time to code things in a way that is clean and valid.
Search engines are only as smart as the people who write them, and even given this obvious limitation they are extremely versatile machines and are incredibly thorough and efficient at what they do. That being said, search bots are programmed to scan code that is written properly. When they encounter bad code, they tend to run into things they don’t know how to interpret, never make it to some of the more important content on the page, or cross paths with things like images, flash and other rich media that it can’t decipher. Clean, valid and, most importantly, search optimized code can be used to provide the easiest possible path for search bots of all shapes and sizes so that your site can be crawled and indexed properly.
One good thing about coding for search engines is that they don’t have eyes. One of the hardest challenges when dealing with coding for people with disabilities is ensuring that screen readers work effectively on a site. Clean code is the best place to start if you want to build a site that can truly be visited by all.
Whether the site is going to be updated by the original coder or someone new, having clean, valid, and well commented HTML and CSS will not only ensure that future updates can be executed in a timely manner, but this added efficiency almost always helps to keep future costs down, and certainly helps to keep frustration to a minimum.
