Why make your Website W3C Compliant
Why do we need Web Standards?
Take as an example, you need to buy a new light bulb, they come in a few standard sizes / fittings. Imagine if every single manufacturer in the world made their own light bulbs to their own desired sizes and fittings, it would be a nightmare getting hold of one that fitted your particular lamp.
Another example would be railway tracks imagine if all train companies had differing widths of under carriages as indeed it used to be in the UK where the Railway was invented. When Isambard Kingdon Brunel the great British steam and steel entrepreneur designed his Great Western railway network on 7' broad railway tracks and George Stevenson made his on 4' 8½" wide railway tracks it was inevitable only one could win as they would never be compatible. The standards were set when it was decided to adopt the narrower gauge railway tracks and we still only have George Stevenson’s track width in use today in the UK and across the world.
Standards need to be adopted if the global internet community is going to be able through differing browsers view your website as you would like them to see it. Hence the W3C compliant standards were created to provide such internationally accepted standards to enable webmasters to create professional looking websites which maintained their integrity across the spectrum of browsers.
The benefits of having a W3C compliant site
Accessibility - Not all your visitors will be using the same browser or type of device to read your website. There may be visitors using Internet Explorer on their PC, others may be using Firefox, then of course there are visitors using mobile phones and other handheld devices. By using web standards you can ensure that your site is viewable by all of these.
Over 2 million people in the UK have a visual impairment, a well structured site conforming to web standards should be accessible to visitors using screen readers. The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to provide a service that is not accessible to everyone, since 1999 organisations in the UK are legally obliged to make their websites disabled-friendly.
Maintenance - Using web standards can reduce the time and cost of maintaining your site.
By using CSS a small change such as the colour of a particular font can be updated on your whole site by editing 1 line in the stylesheet file, compare that to having to manually edit every single page on your site if you are not using CSS.
By separating the content from the design you can easily have different people working on different parts of the site without them breaking each others code. For example your programmer could be working on the XHTML while your designer works on the CSS files.
Using web standards will make it easier if someone else needs to edit the website in the future. By using standards another developer can easily understand the code and make quick changes without having to read through loads of code to try to understand what it all does first.
Speed - Using XHTML & CSS for your layout instead of a table based design will results in less code therefore smaller file sizes making your site load faster. You also get the added benefit of reduced bandwidth usage, sure a couple of kilobits may not seem much at first but if your site gets 1000's of visitors then it will soon add up.
Future proof - By following web standards your site should be more compatible with future technologies and future browsers.
Search engines ranking - Well structure pages will make it easier for search engine spiders to extract the information it needs to understand what a page is about. Proper use of heading tags can be used to break up your pages into sections. You can also benefit from having a better code/text ratio.
If your site doesn't follow standards then you're running the risk of loosing visitors. If you're using non-standard code that only works in some browsers then you are potentially ignoring 100's even 1000's of visitors / customers.
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