www.crytech.com
“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back…. You take
the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up and believe whatever you want to
believe. You take the red pill... you stay in wonderland and I show you just
how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
— Lawrence Fishburne (Morpheus), ©1999 Warner Brothers - The
Matrix
This passage from the 1999 Warner Brothers cult classic film The Matrix depicts a truth so powerful that it alters perception which remains unknown to unsuspecting individuals. The following information reveals a similar truth within the Internet landscape that will alter your perception of your website and the Internet as a whole. You need to ask yourself, do you take the red pill?
While your website might have a nice look and function on the surface, do you know if it’s actually built correctly? For most people, this is a difficult question to answer but the fact is that most websites on the Internet today are NOT built correctly. With today’s WYSIWYG editors, just about anyone can create a website. The problem is that as most designers use these editors, the underlying HTML code used to build a site is corrupted with hundreds of useless tags. Like building a straw house in tornado alley, you end up with a site that is literally blown away by the competition. Good code vs. bad code.
The Internet is everywhere your customers are. Your website isn’t being viewed by just web browsers anymore. Devices like BlackBerry’s, cell phones, PDAs, and even gaming consoles are viewing your site. Not to mention all of the other software, search engines, or social networks that are constantly indexing and cataloging websites. If your website isn’t built correctly, it could easily be overlooked and you could be missing out on a huge portion of your online market.
The key lies with accessibility and standardization. The more accessible your website is (specifically the raw data), the more accessed your website becomes. Ensuring your website is accessible begins by ensuring it’s written in accordance with today’s web standards. That’s right, web standards; something most web companies haven’t heard about or chose to follow.
For the longest time, there has been no finite standardization to ensure websites are built correctly. This all changed with the establishment of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the web standards put in place. All of the major players (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc.) all back these web standards and help enforce them in some degree. This is the future of the Internet, is your site living up to its full potential or is it being ignored?
So, how can you tell if your site is built correctly? There are a few easy tests that you can do:
Crytech proudly supports and builds all of its sites within the standards put in place by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). With these standards in place, your website is not only easy for people to understand, but the underlying meaningful markup - otherwise known as semantic markup - can be understood by programs and other devices.
In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non
proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to
avoid market fragmentation.
Good Code vs. Bad
To check the validity of your website, you can use our W3C validation tool. Enter your web address to validate your website against the W3C standards.
“I am so very grateful for all of your skills, talent, time, motivation, and kindness.”—Julie Carter, Founder, Chiari People
![Are You Red[e]?](/images/are_you_rede.gif){kind=small}