W3C errors

Hi,I am rebuilding my website using a professional Dreamweaver template. All has been well but now that I have some pages done I am finding errors when I run it through W3C.org validation. I am not well versed enough to fix these issues myself, and since I am using a template I cannot use the tidy option and replace my code. Well, I guess I could copy it into TextPad and upload the files - I will do that worse case scenario. But, mainly I am wondering if this will have an impact on my page rank or search engine standing. Do the search engines look to see if the code is immaculate or contains errors?Thank you for the help,Jeanne

 

"professional dreamweaver template" BWHAHAAAA!!! Oh, you slay me... Wait... you're serious?!?

No offense, but Dreamweaver 'templates' and the word professional don't even belong in the same sentence -- but to me the only thing about Dreamweaver that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it's use. The system by which it handles templating (comments) can even cause pages to not render properly in some browsers (comments between floats or certain types of positioning can actually trip rendering bugs! Yes, I said COMMENTS!). It sounds like you've already been led down the garden path by someone... but then that's the entire web development industry in a nutshell at this point -- preying upon the ignorance of others.

Jokes and industry bashing ranting aside, without seeing the site in question or the code in question we couldn't even BEGIN to help you clean it up or point out what's wrong with it -- though being something built in dreamweaver it's probably knee deep in decade out of date code, javascript doing CSS' job, and endless pointless code bloat and lack of semantics -- though that's a WILD GUESS... well, not that wild as it is based on experience.

In terms of SEO, most search engines don't care about valid or not, even in terms of rendering it's probably a non-issue. Some validation errors can even be ignored like the use of browser specific properties to fix rendering or use the "CSS3 that isn't CSS3". Other validation errors can be really important not from a SEO standpoint, but from an accessibility and bandwidth one as a lot of tags and even more attributes from HTML 3.2 have no business even being on a website coded after 1998. FONT, CENTER, ALIGN, VALIGN, BORDER, BGCOLOR for being presentational, others like TARGET being for pissing on accessibility from orbit... and others just being redundant and/or pointless like MENU, DIR, APPLET, STRIKE, etc, etc...

Also how well does the site render across the different browsers? Unclosed tags and improper markup can make a site work poorly in browsers other than the one the original designer built for (when they SHOULD have been building for all of them), and can result in endless pointless idiocy like IE conditional comments and browser specific properties just to hack around the rendering errors instead of *SHOCK* actually fixing the underlying code. There's a reason I say that such methodologies are usually an indication of flawed design and/or site construction techniques.

Is the document a tranny or an actual modern doctype? Is it a recommendation doctype or not-ready for prime time HTML 5 asshattery with the accompanying train wreck of 'shiv' and 'polyfill' bloat? Remember, transitional is for code that is in transition from 1997 to 1998 coding practices, and HTML 5 offers no legitimate real word advantages over 4, and in many ways seems carefully crafted to set coding standards BACK a decade or MORE! -- which is why a proper current website should be written using HTML 4 STRICT or XHTML 1.0 STRICT. Anyone telling you otherwise has either failed to grasp what HTML 5 is, or still has their head permanently wedged up 1997's arse.

But again, a LOT of what I'm saying here may or may not apply since we can't help you without seeing the code in question.

Though since it's already in DW why would you need textpad? (Note, textpad can mangle code if you don't use the right save options, thanks crApple! Though that's where text-wrangler comes in handy if you're stuck on a Quackintosh...) -- Dreamweaver HAS a code-view which is the only way you can even come CLOSE to making anything decent using that overpriced fat bloated steaming pile of manure that's the antithesis of accessible, maintainable and sustainable web development.