Looking Under the Hood at Your Website

When you need a makeover at your website (and here are 10 signs that you do), you are likely to know it because of the things you see on the screen.

Maybe the design doesn't look fresh any more, or the information is out of date, or you've realized that your visitors just aren't having the kind of experience you want them to have.

But there are other things to look for. If you have someone like me to look under the hood for you, relax. Or if you already know html code and can recognize coding problems, you've got it under control. If not, then it's worth learning a quick and simple way to get an idea of whether your site is up to modern standards or not.

I'm not going to get technical on you. I'm going to tell you an easy way to check, using your "find" function, even if you know nothing at all about how websites are built.

First, where is under the hood at your website? You can see the code for your site by pushing "control" or "command" and then U.

Look at the head of the site, the part right at the top of the page. Here are two examples. The first one just says "html," and has only a title, no meta tags.

The second has a more complete definition of what kind of html it's using. You can find people who strongly feel that strict xhtml (like the example below -- see where it says "strict" in the first line?) is better than other kinds. You may not know or care about different forms. However, using just "html" and no more definition than that is only good for email, and is a sure sign that your site was built by an amateur.



Notice that this second example also has lines that start with "meta." Again, there are various views on what kinds of meta data a site ought to have, but you can be sure that it should have some.

One thing it certainly should have is a meta description. You can use "find" to track down "description" and see what it says. If you don't have one, if it has a long long paragraph or a lot of repeated keywords, or if it says, "Put description here," then your site hasn't been built in the best possible way.

Both examples have something saying "css," and that's a good sign. HTML and CSS are two different languages. HTML is about the meaning of the site, and CSS is about the style, or what it looks like. Using html to make a site look a particular way -- for colors, for example, or to choose a font -- is a sign of an old-fashioned site that won't perform well on modern computers.

Have a peek under the hood at your website and see how it looks. Or if you're thinking of having a website built and considering a few different designers, look under the hood at their websites and see how their work looks. A site built to current standards will work better, and longer, than a poorly-built site.