Web Standards. Should my business site be compliant? - page 2

by Thomas Ashworth, 1/31/2006

A potential downside to a standards compliant website is some site add-ins such as certain bulletin boards, calendars and other dynamic content may not be written in a standards compliant manner. This becomes a problem when the add-in content is the only one that exactly fits your functional requirements. Sometimes in this scenario it may be necessary to forgo full standards compliance on pages where your non-standards compliant dynamic content is needed and migrate the page once the developers adopt standards.

A plus side of web-standards based sites is that maintenance is made easier, meaning your site can be more easily altered. As style is handled by an external (W3C) Style Sheet it is possible to change a sites whole colour scheme by changing a few key values. Also, as no styling information is in the HTML it is much tidier and greatly reduced in size making it easier to read and alter. Smaller file sizes mean that pages load quickly (providing a better experience for customers on slow connections), consume less bandwidth (reducing hosting costs to your business).

The final benefit of well constructed standards based websites is that as well as being accessible to your customers, often it will also be more accessible to search engines. Poorly structured inaccessible websites can often mean that some of the relevance of your text is misinterpreted by search engines. This means you could be losing out in search engine listings. By having a cleanly structured web standards website you are helping to ensure that your site (and its keywords) are correctly represented in search engines and is considered more relevant than non-standards based sites in your industry. The obvious conclusion to this article is that web standards bring real tangible benefits to business. Although finding a design company that will construct a standards compliant site is more difficult than just finding a web designer, the benefits speak for themselves. By moving to a standards based web site businesses can ensure they have accessible sites which are maintainable and future proofed. Increased customer exposure and search engine prominence can all improve the level of business that comes to you via your website. Web standards are the future of the internet and to ignore it could leave your business trailing behind the online competition.

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About the author

Thomas Ashworth is a developer for NuBlue Web Solutions based in Lancashire, UK. www.nublue.co.uk

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