Four Web Coding Rules to Maximize ROI

Posted in: Blog, Featured, News, Technology, Web Design, Web Marketing
on November 21, 2010
Tags: design, programming, web

Poorly coded web assets hinder campaign performance. Additionally, sloppy code can cost thousands of dollars in consultant fees and lost consumer confidence and response. While most mainstream web users are often unaware of the strategy and work required to make a website function properly, all are intolerant when the same code is broken. All the beauty and elegance in the world will never compensate for the ugliness of improper rendering. The aim of this article is to illustrate the importance of correct coding practices in the context of broader marketing strategies.

With the variety of technologies being used to display web marketing assets (websites, landing pages, ads, email campaigns, etc) to customers, presentational coding best practices are becoming impossible to ignore. The web browser, operating system, and hardware landscape is an ever evolving mush of disparate technologies that will always share one unavoidable commonality: the internet.

Faced by a client or project that requires web assets, it’s up to marketing professionals to take real business objectives and translate them into a creative/technological solution that will wear well over time and provide the largest return on each marketing dollar. While non-validated code may look and function very similarly to a validated site, the devil is in the details, along with those last drops of ROI.

Establishing proper code-work as a priority in the beginning of a campaign maneuver ensures decreased scaling costs while maximizing present-effort punch.

There are at least four main areas to consider in order to achieve maximum effectiveness of your web assets in the marketplace:

1. Validate Your Code

Validated XHTML and CSS just work better. By spending the time and money to get your team up to par on XHTML/CSS validation, you guarantee that your customer’s web assets will render correctly 99.9% of the time. As one Twitter user (@Zeldman) states, “[The] Client who saves $5,000 buying cut-rate non-semantic HTML will later spend $25,000 on [an] SEO consultant to compensate”. Finally, validation ensures proper use of often overlooked HTML attributes and tags. The best example is the “alt” attribute of the HTML image tag; this attribute is often excluded and the result is below optimal search performance.

2. Perform Basic Search Engine Optimization

In its basic form, SEO practices include proper use of HTML meta-tags, header tags, image ALT attributes, etc. Though the ongoing practice of SEO is aimed at optimizing over a certain set of key words or phrases, a properly coded site must at least use HTML tags appropriately as a starting point for any potential long-term SEO. Baseline SEO attentiveness may be the difference between being found in a targeted search, or being lost among hundreds of pages of search clutter.

3. Ensure Graceful Degradation of Code

What happens if your user’s browser doesn’t allow Javascript or Flash? Worse yet, what happens if the in-office network hasn’t allowed updates to Internet Explorer for three years and all employees are forced to use the dreaded IE6? Graceful degradation takes into account these possibilities and provides graceful fallback solutions that still allow your customer’s website to display properly, with only minor losses of animation or functionality.

4. Use Flash Carefully

Flash’s viability as a valuable web authoring tool is under active and heavy debate. Proponents argue that it allows a richer experience with security, stability, and light-weight code while opponents criticize its lack of SEO capabilities (though certain HTML measures can be taken to avoid this issue) and mobile device unfriendliness. With the growing popularity of iPhones and iPads, web professionals are being forced to rethink the way websites are built, and unfortunately for Adobe, Flash is not penciled to be supported on either device (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/iphone-developer-policy/). Flash has its irreplaceable place as a web technology, but audience and medium should be carefully considered when choosing whether or not to include it in your online marketing efforts.

When my team is approached with a project, our first objective is to take a step back and consider the technological possibilities, scope and scale potential, and design implications. Only after careful technical mapping and planning can the creative process begin. This ensures that clients get beautiful execution throughout, that we can build upon easily as their business grows (which, of course, is the objective of all marketing…).

The scope of this discussion is limited to the code that is rendered by customer’s browsers. Though the presentation of online assets (HTML/CSS) is just one piece of a well-oiled marketing campaign or online brand presence, if done properly it will set a foundation for a stronger, more scalable campaign that serves to maximize returns on marketing dollars spent.