Why Use Web Standards?
Many clients ask us - why should we have our site designed or re-designed using web standards? It’s an excellent question. The benefits of using web standards are so numerous it’s hard to know where to begin. First, a bit of history.
Back in the web’s infancy web pages were very simple black and white pages with text only. As the web became popular designers started using more images and tried to create complex layouts using archaic tools. The sites they built sometimes looked OK on the surface but underneath they were a huge mess. Nested tables, spacer gifs and invalid markup are just a few of the scary sounding terms used in this era. This resulted in reduced usability and exponentially increased development and maintenance time. In other words, the sites of old were built like a house of cards - problematic to change and inherently unstable.
Little did most web desigers know that the W3C - the governing body for web formatting - had developed a set of web standards that would make their sites much more effective. The W3C set out best practices for designing web sites according to internationally agreed upon rules. These rules are like buildng codes for construction - giving us the blueprints for quality construction. The guidelines are somewhat nerdy web developer code but their benefits will be attractive to any business owner.
One of the best parts of the web standards is the use of CSS or Cascading Style Sheets to separate your site contents (text, images) from the design. This allows site changes to be much more efficient than older methods since you are modifying much less information.
Getting back to the contruction analogy - the old methods of web design (and what some still employ today) will work in a limited sense. Any hatchet carpenter can build a primitive hut that will suffice for a short term dwelling. However, it takes a qualified builder adhering to building codes to create a lasting structure that will be safe and work properly for the future.
Hiring a web design company that follows web standards can benefit you in many ways as will be explained next.