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WordPress has become the blogging tool of choice and little wonder when you consider it allows non-technical users to rapidly produce good looking web sites for zero outlay, has a countless number of add-ons and enhancements and Google seems to adore anything produced with it.

I’ve settled on WordPress for all my new sites. The idea of reinventing the wheel by going back to static sites makes no sense. Even site design is easily taken care or by picking one of the thousands of free themes out there and simply plugging it in.

Previously web site design was a bit of an ordeal. I would create my static templates, mess around with CSS until everything was the way I wanted it, battle with the usual cross browser issues and sometimes many days later admire the finished article. Then I’d run the site through the obligatory XHTML and CSS validators, fix whatever was broken and finally launch it. I was never one for DreamWeaver, I tried but it always seemed to restrict rather than enhance my options.

Since I’ve moved from collaborating in large projects to producing many, much simpler sites for my own business WordPress works for me because it saves me time. Install, pick my theme, add my plugins and start producing content. This procedure takes me around 30 minutes tops. It’s just too easy. So easy in fact you can be lulled into a false sense of security and become lazy in the process.

For instance, today I ran one of my new WordPress sites through the XHTML validator. I was shocked at what I found.

In total there were 193 errors! That’s the most I have ever encountered on a page I’ve produced, by a large margin. Horrified I started checking down the list of problems.

I was finding closing paragraph tags where I didn’t expect them, the validator was showing nothing at all for my document outline, it was even telling me my closing body and html elements were faulty! What the hell?

WordPress users will know there are two methods for adding content to a new post or page. You either use the visual editor or go straight to HTML markup. I prefer the latter as I believe (believed) it gives me more precise control.

So I checked out my source content in the HTML editor. All appeared fine with none of the spurious paragraph tags in evidence and, according to what I was seeing in the edit box, clean and valid markup.

A check of the rendered page source code gave me my answer. Not only was WordPress modifying my content by sticking in seemingly random paragraph and break tags, the theme I was using had a broken structure. The only reason my pages were displaying in the browser as intended was because the browser itself was compensating for my horribly broken markup.

Immediately I searched my admin panel for a way to turn this content rewriting off. No luck, it seems this “feature” is hard-wired into the application source code. I could have changed that to get rid of this unwanted helper but what about the next time I upgrade? I would come right back.

I understand why this feature exists, it’s to allow users who don’t know anything about HTML and have no desire to learn to produce content in much the same way as they would do so in the word processors and email clients they are used to. Fair enough, but what about me and anyone else who wants to control their output?

Also, what about that theme with the fundamentally broken structure? Now I’m not talking about some freebie theme I downloaded from a dubious source. I’m talking about a very well known and expensive theme that makes the claim of producing valid XHTML.

Some might wonder, if the page looks okay in the browser who cares what the underlying code is like? To those people I would ask them to try visiting any Google forum and asking any sort of question about your web site – why hasn’t it been indexed, why has its ranking dropped off, anything really.

The “helpful” folks in those forums, smug know-it-alls to a man it appears, will always shoot back, “Your code is rubbish, you should start by fixing this, that, the other!” On the Google forums, at least, valid markup is the minimum requirement for getting any form of civilised assistance.

Does this, therefore, imply Google places weight on the quality of your markup when ranking your pages or deciding whether to even index them? Like most things with Google, your guess is as good as mine but it sure seems that way if you listen to the sighs and groans of the Google forum dwellers when they discover you (or rather your template designer) hasn’t attached a type declaration to a style element. Perhaps they get house points for sucking up to Google?

And if they are right, is your theme and even WordPress itself harming your rankings? If any reader with a desire to share knowledge (without the attitude problem prevalent in the Google forums) would like to clue me in here I’d be most grateful. It’s worth remembering that nobody is an expert in every discipline, except for Google forum junkies.

There are ways around these problems which I’ll cover in another posting. After much work the pages on my new site are all valid. I guess I’d better check the pages on this blog next.

Clean and semantic markup is not just about avoiding scorn in the Google forums. Don’t forget about screen readers or the increasing number of ways sites can interact or extract information based on markup structure. Plus I’m betting browsers render valid markup more quickly than broken code and hints abound that Google will be taking page load speed into consideration as part of its ranking algorithm.

Why not head across to W3C now and check out your own sites. You might be in for a surprise.

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