Learning SEO by Doing it Hardcore - Beauty is Only Skin Deep
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Many people use Dreamweaver for creating web pages. Some use FrontPage. There are new “user-friendly” programs and interfaces being created all the time to assist users in building web pages. Most of these are designed to protect users from the code – or perhaps to protect the code from users. The idea behind these programs and interfaces is that you should be able to create a web page without knowing how to program. Even a simple tagging language such as HTML can seem threatening to some people.
You really can’t be an SEO without knowing some HTML, so Martinez’s thirteenth tip shouldn’t scare too many of you off. “Get a text editor like Wordpad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch.” If you’ve never tried to code a web page from scratch, you may find this to be an eye-opening, frustrating, or even humbling experience. I know there’s no way I could do something like this without a couple of reference books open in front of me, but then again I don’t write HTML for a living.
If you’re thinking “Neither do I, really, so why should I do this?” consider what Martinez has to say about it. He insists that “when you’ve seen just how stupid your templated CSS code really is, you’ll begin to understand why ugly works better than pretty.” Ugly works better than pretty? Is Martinez serious?
He is, and he’s not the only one saying it. In an entry going back to March 2006, Robert Scoble talks about “the anti-marketing marketing” in his blog, with plentyoffish.com as the exemplar. He’s talking about the actual site looking ugly rather than the code, but one line from the blog post seems particularly relevant here: “It’s amazing how few corporate types get that the quality and engineering thought behind your HTML matters more than whether your site is pretty or not.” The bones matter more than the flesh, even if is the flesh that most users see, because the bones (code) of a site affect a user’s site experience at least as much as the appearance.
Scoble chose plentyoffish.com as his example because the dating site was specifically designed to be easy to use, fast to load, and uncluttered. Those features still matter, even in this day and age of heavy broadband Internet use. You get a page that can do all that by writing tight code – and the code created by web site design programs is rather on the loose side. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes it’s the things a visitor can’t see that make a site lovely.
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