A company meeting was held Friday, where the owner had a talk with us about W3 Validation and ensuring that we convey to our customers just how important it is. This started as a competitor attempting to be hired by our company sent an email to our owner explaining that many customer’s websites did not validate.  So why would explain that here?

When we design a website, it will validate, as many of our customers know during their website orientation period after the website development is completed.  However, changes you make thereafter such as removing elements, adding plugins, or adding elements can invalidate your website.  This is a technical issue and generally will not hurt your search engine rankings, but it can greatly affect cross-browser compatibility because each browser handles errors differently — some won’t display them, some will, and some ignores it. So, while your change may look great on your browser, it could look quite differently on another browser.

So, it is very important that after you add a plugin or add new content or images that you visit, validator.w3.org to ensure that your website’s HTML code is still valid.