SPWD

I work for the Professional Bull Riders, Inc. in the capacity of Web Developer (Visit the PBR Online. Recently we have been looking at making changes to the site, adding more content pages, restructuring the layout on some of the internal pages to be more modern looking and reviewing search engine optimization and marketing.

All of this is necessary for growth, sustained visitors, enhancements and general creating forward motion on any given web site, especially for one that is in the top tier of sports entertainment. The issue happens, as it has happened at countless other enterprises, the code base is getting older, has been touched by many programmers over the years and is nearing point of needing to be completely rewrote to be modernized. That happens. No question.

The discussion here is, does clean, well commented code help sustainability in an application, including a web application? Short answer is yes. Does valid HTML markup do the same? Again, the short answer is yes. If the code base that exists is written using proper and valid HTML/XHTML markup, and is commented properly or document properly to give other developers a decent idea of the logic behind any given subset of functions, routines and other logic to understand what was being done and why. It also helps for the same developer when he/she needs to go back and make changes on code that may have been written months, even years prior.

As we move forward at my place of employment, we are looking at various platforms, ideas and methodologies to create a platform that is extensible, pliable and can be built upon in the future. This platform, as it will become, will be something that can be built upon to create the best possible presence, as any enterprise should have a goal of accomplishing.

So does clean code and markup matter? Yes it does, and if your enterprise, business, or site is lacking in that area, shouldn’t it be about time to correct that situation?