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We have spoken of the benefits of W3C code validation for SEO and for human usability. The World Wide Web Consortium offers an impressively wide array of tools for validation of website code and content. They really are doing some good work. Here is what they say about their goal and purpose.

“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. Join groups, and participate in W3C blogs and other discussion. We welcome your help to fulfill the W3C mission: to lead the Web to its full potential.”

They offer a really large variety of specific tools for validation. Their work affects all of us, builders of sites, content writers, buyers, and users alike.

One of the most commonly used services is the W3C Markup Validator. This can be done online, easily. They also, being Open Source kind of people, a good thing, offer source code in various flavors. You can get what you need for Windows, Mac, and various excellent varieties of Linux. The markup validator is one of the tools your web designer may use to assure W3C compliance for your site.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, a very important tool for achieving human usable and machine verifiable sites. The W3C offers their tool for validating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with style sheets. This is of immense value for web designers and those who depend on them to deliver properly functioning websites. This will compare the style sheets used for your site to the CSS specifications, finding errors, incorrect implementations of CSS, even typos. It will also catch many potential problems with usability, an important function of CSS.

Some people love RSS/Atom feeds and find them to be a important part of their web experience. The W3C offers a validation service to check the syntax of RSS or Atom feeds. I am suppressing my natural tendency to rant against feeds here. I find them to be nothing but annoying information overload, but they are popular and your customers may love them. Therefore, you should give them feeds, and use the W3C RSS/Atom feed validator to check them out.

Another progressive and progressively more popular use of the internet is access by mobile devices. The W3C offers a validator for that too. Their special validator tests Web Pages to determine their level of mobile-friendliness. Delivering a mobile-friendly page is a critical task, and their validator can be a huge help.

Massively important and very useful is the W3C Link Checker. This tool will check a page or a whole site for issues with links, anchors, and referenced objects. As either a designer, a buyer, or a user of sites, you already know how important working links are, from an SEO, validation, and usability standpoint.

There is more to W3C Validation. They not only offer the tools, they offer education in how to use the tools. They also offer help to write the code that works, and if that is not enough, they will direct you to further education opportunities. They are very helpful indeed in this regard.

But if you just need a site that works, and are not quite up to assimilating and putting into practice all the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium for writing valid code, rejoice. There is a great web designer standing by and ready to help you. The designers knows the techniques and has the tools to create you a website that is findable, functional, and usable. Your professional web designer, using W3C Validation, will build you a site that your users will find pleasurable and you will find to be profitable.