Why your business benefits from adhering to the web standards

Web standards are created to give benefits to the developer and the visitor. As a business, your website must be accessible, usable, attractive and convey a message of trust and professionalism. Getting this right can be both expensive and difficult if done outside of the W3 standards.

Let's look at the main benefits of web standards.

Accessibility

Valid XHTML and CSS will ensure that a site is constructed in a way that seperates the content from presentation.

There are huge business gains to be had from this method such as less maintenance, more control, lower costs etc., but importantly, accessible content. Not everyone uses a common browser to access the web and a valid site will mean your information will have the widest potential audience.

Usability

Semantic markup creates a usable website. We have all seen cluttered sites with no per-page focus, navigation that leads you into the abyss and forces URL amendments as well as document structure that makes a web page unreadable and hard to follow. You have a point to make. Every page has a focus and the content is clear. Web standards will ensure that people get to the point of your site, quickly and effortlessly.

Compatibility

We are in the 21st century and there are now a wider range of platforms, devices and browsers than ever before. More and more people are accessing the internet and due to this diversity, building a website by following guidelines is the only way to ensure uniformity.

Substantially increased performance

By removing formatting from the markup, you can reduce the file sizes of your website which means people with slower connections or users from around the globe have a better browsing experience. Using tables for layout can sometimes treble the file sizes as positioning requires attributes to table cells and occasionally invisble images forcing layouts to look "correct". CSS can acheive this and more from a light weight text file that when cached, will not need reloading further increasing performance.

Higher search engine rankings

Not only will a user struggle to navigate an unusable and invalid site, so will a search engines spider. If your documents are marked up correctly and fast to load then a search engine will reward your web pages with better listings. Why serve a user a scruffy and hard to read web page when a perfectly readable and accessible page exists?

Powerful designs

CSS is an extremely flexible and powerful way of styling a website. All the formatting is contained within one text file meaning a new design overhaul is very cost effective and fast to turn around from a designers point of view, meaning lower costs to the business. If done correctly, CSS can degrade gracefully in older browsers which lack support into a perfectly readable document which is the beauty of following the web standards.

Lower business costs

A website following the web standards is a more efficient and smaller website in terms of file sizes and bandwidth.

This translates into reduced hosting costs. Changing contractors can be a problem if the code is written with proprietary software that creates untidy or browser specific HTML. Following a set of standards means contractors can hit the ground running and give you far better value for money.

About the Author
Author of Optimising Your Website, and an IT Consultant for local UK Government and various European Union initiatives, Edward Clarke specialises in website accessibility, css, web standards and search engine optimisation. Visit Edward's consultancy website and his blog for more information.