Tomorrow is the launch of a new product called Multi Profit Websites, it’s a tool for internet marketers to quickly make their own money generating websites for the niches they are interested in. Here’s a link to their website: http://www.multiprofitwebsites.com/

This redirects to video3, so there’s two others here that are well worth watching:

* http://www.multiprofitwebsites.com/video2/
* http://www.multiprofitwebsites.com/video1/

You may be wondering who would buy this product, because clearly from our view, the quality of the markup this system generates is slap bang in the previous century.

Have a read of potential buyers, fellow internet marketers: http://www.multiprofitwebsites.com/blog/?p=3&cpage=1#comments — it’s an eyeopening read. And these people will be refreshing like crazy tomorrow trying to be the first ones to buy the product at it’s introductory price (my guess about $197). After the introductory period has ended I’d expect the price to go up to $497.

That’s $200 for a product that does a fraction of what Wordpress can do. But, it’s simpler to install and run (Not using databases is regarded as a feature). Lifetime support – something you can’t get from Wordpress.

So after tomorrow, a couple of hundred thousand new sites will appear as the Internet Marketing crowd buy, download and install this product, and create multiple websites targetting each of their niches.

Custom templates can be purchased, commissioned by the same two guys, for the cheap price of $47 per theme. That’s $47 for a template that neither validates, nor be accessible, nor follow anything like web standards. These won’t be anywhere near the free Blogger templates done by the webstandards crowd.

You think the two people behind this product won’t sell many of these? One of the people behind this product – John Thornhill – claims that he took home $250,000 in 2007 selling ebooks on ebay. And, incredulous as it sounds, I believe him.

He taught himself internet marketing and started to make money working at home. Quit his day job in a factory, and now works whenever he feels like it.

So he’s spent $100,000 over 3 years to build this product. Validation, web standards and accessibility not taken into consideration. It launches tomorrow. It does less than Wordpress. People have to pay for it. And we’ll see countless of thousands of websites created from this product.

Welcome to the real web of tomorrow. Still as broken as before. Despite the freely available Wordpress and it’s perceived support of web standards, internet marketers will buy a worse product because it fills the need they (believe they) have.

Have you see any valid arguments for status quo? I’ve only seen resistance to validating markup based on the argument that it will break the Web since current content on the Web is not valid. It’s like a deliberate attempt to ignore the fact that validating markup should only apply to future content written to a future spec.

If a site validates, it looks more professional. Yes, yes, and yes.

But then you get situations where stuff like embed is non-standard, non-valid, but is better for accessibility. So should you use embed? Yes.

Validation is good, and if you can validate it’s an indicator that your site will be better. But I’d rather have a site with well structured semantic HTML with presentation, content and behaviour separated nicely (only with a couple of unencoded ampersands) than a tag soup page which just happens to validate…

So yes, I’d say we are still having this argument. Because while validation is good, there are times when a failure to validate may be justified. That’s a valid reason for the argument continuing.

Unfortunately in practice the main reason appears to be that people can’t be bothered to take the time to put together a few basic checks when putting their site together and don’t adhere to any professional standards. And that, I can completely agree with you on, is wrong.