When I was in college I was a theatre major. One of the classes I took was in costume design. We worked fast and furious putting grand medieval costumes together. We were taught not to care about the insides. As long as there was no danger of a costume malfunction, we were good to go.

This was not what I was accustomed to. In my high school Home Economics class (yes, I’m that old), we were taught to sew a garment so beautifully that we could wear it “inside out.”

But in my theater class, it didn’t make a difference. Speed was essential. What the audience saw were gorgeous, colorful costumes. Everyone was happy. If my home economics teacher was in the audience she was none the wiser.

Have you ever had a web developer tell you your web page code was messy? In a disdainful voice he said something tactful like, “Your code is jacked up.”

Yet, to you, your web pages look just fine.

Is the “jacked up code” going to make a difference? Not likely. I have some “jacked up code” on many of my web pages and those pages draw plenty of visitors according to my analytics tracking reports.

And from what my reliable sources tell me, the search engine bots just skip over messy web page code and read the pages just fine.

All things being equal, I would still rather have good, clean code underneath my pages*— there may be some benefit. But it can be time-consuming and expensive to repair, with little to show for it in terms of sales.

So if you’re getting plenty visitors to your website, you don’t need to worry about messy code.

Easy Web Tip #125: When a web developer tells you your web page code is messed up, it’s really no biggie.

*Since writing this tip, I’ve redeveloped my website and, hopefully, my code is now neat and tidy.