Complying with website standards ensures that you get a non-proprietary website of the highest quality that works for everyone who visits it.
Building a standards compliant website requires following the recommendations developed by the Web's international governing body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
A standards complaint website:
- Costs less—because it uses fewer lines of code and less bandwidth, scales easily, updates painlessly, and completely separates design from content.
- Works better—in old and new browsers, screen readers, and wireless devices.
- Transfers seamlessly—to a new host server or web developer because it uses a non-proprietary programming language.
- Reaches more people—with disabilities and accessibility issues, uncommon browsers, or text-only screens.
- Adheres to accessibility laws—created and enforced in more nations every year.
- Ranks higher in search engines—by using semantic mark-up that makes it more "findable".
- Has staying power—will work just as well in tomorrow's browsers, next year's and beyond.
- Is beautifully simple—it replaces complicated, proprietary, obsolete code with code that is truly elegant in its simplicity.
What to ask for:
When you purchase a website, ensure you get the best—ask for:
- An "open", non-proprietary programming language like "XHTML strict". "XHTML" means that you benefit from the power of XML (extensible mark-up language), and "strict" ensures your site won't mix presentation mark-up with the structure.
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that completely control the way the site looks (colours, images, placement of content, etc). They separate form from structure, meaning that you can re-style your entire website by changing one file.
- Semantic markup that uses tags to identify blocks of text (like headings, subheadings, block quotations, etc.) in a way that makes the code more "intelligent".
- Valid code that has been tested and deemed free of errors by the W3C's free Validator Service.
It is the Web Designer's job to follow the W3C guidelines to build websites that comply with their open standards. That job has become easier since browser developers (like Microsoft, Netscape and Mozilla) finally agreed to work together to build browsers that support them. In the past, creating a pleasing website required the Web Designer to use many creative "hacks" (like using tables to format entire pages, even though they are really meant only to display tabular data) to make the page look good in every kind of browser. Today, due to newer, open standards browsers, we can code each website cleanly, elegantly, and simply, without the need for "hacks".
Don't settle for a website that is obsolete before it ever launches; maximize your investment with a standards compliant site that will stand the test of time.
For more information about our standards compliant websites, contact us today.
