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.
Posted by admin on Saturday, September 5th, 2009
