When you buy a new car, you look under the hood, right? Every one does, but can you identify the emission components? How about the air conditioning condenser?

We really don’t think about the arcane parts under the hood until, for example, our vehicle fails its emission test. Then we care! Do we really need a new PCV valve, and what the heck is it, anyway?

Your web site is much the same. While web sites don’t “break,” you generally don’t care about what’s under the hood of your web site until something goes wrong or some changes are needed.

What’s under the hood of your web site is becoming more and more important because it can affect your web site maintenance costs, how your site appears on different browsers, and even how search engines rank your site.

First, a little background. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) was developed back in the 1980’s basically to allow one page to link to another over the fledgling internet. Over time it became more robust (some would say bloated), but is still the basic building block of all web sites.

HTML “tags” are inserted in the content of a web site to control such things as font size, color, paragraph breaks titles and so on. These tags are identified with open and close brackets (<,>). For example, in an HTML document <b>bolds text and</b> turns off the bold.

Now, try this. While viewing this page (or most any web page), click View, then click Source on your browser tool bar. Scroll up and down. You see lots of HTML tags, and if you’re lucky, you can actually spot some page content!

Wow, that’s some pretty awful looking stuff, isn’t it? (I’m not picking on the CummingHome site, almost all web sites look like this, even some of ours.) Now, go to this page, recently completed by Web Design Partners: http://www.smcinc.biz/employment.html .

Now view this source. While this is a simple page, you’ll note that the HTML code is very clean, concise, and you can easily find and read the content.

Now, pull up your web site and see what it looks like. It is probably pretty messy too!

Why is this important? Well, ask yourself these questions: Which page would you rather pay someone to maintain? On which page do you think search engines will find the content more easily?

Now you’ve had a look under the hood of your web site. Like peering under your car hood with your mechanic, it can be scary. Next month we’ll talk about some specific things you can ask your mechanic – er, web designer – to help ensure you’re getting the best mileage (and return) from your site.