When starting up an internet business, perhaps e-commerce or otherwise, you may well consider some of the very good ready made solutions available to create your website with. Whether you are planning to become the next Amazon, or just do a bit of blogging you want to pick a good system.
Comparing the various features and modules, content management systems and transaction processing options available, it is easy to overlook something very simple but equally critical to the successs of your online enterprise, the quality of the mark-up that is generated.
Many OTS solutions spit out some pretty nasty and non-compliant mark-up. Good, semantically correct and web standard compliant code should be a pre-requisite and an important factor when assessing such solutions. The best advice is to take a look at some other websites that use the package, and take a look at their code. A quick look at 'View, Source Code' in your browser will reveal a lot. If you don't know what you're looking for, ask a web developer to take a look for you and assess how good it is.
After all, you want to build your online presence on good foundations. Good compliant code will stand you on an excellent footing for good search results.
