Here are 3 other ways PTRE programs also offer to make you some money:

1- Paid To Search - Get paid to search from programs site or from search sites their affiliated with. Many times you’ll receive paid search links in your email. 2- Paid To Click - Get paid to click on banners and/or links in programs paid to click section. You usually have to stay on visited site for a set time to receive credit (an average of 30 seconds). 3- Paid To Join – Offering a set amount of money for you to join programs, services, newsletters and other related offers. Some programs even pay you a commission to shop from their site.

You won’t get rich with PTRE programs, but you can earn a few bucks, plus quality advertising for your site. Just make sure you don’t get carried away and join too many programs or you’ll be clicking emails for an hour a day.

Can't we just make our own? Two or three years back when not one of major browser manufacturers was conforming to W3C standards, each invented their own flavour of HTML (the language used to describe web pages). As a result web developers had a really hard time of it as they often had to write several different versions of same content in order to get it to display correctly on everyone's computer. Now that Microsoft and Netscape as well as other players are making a big push towards compliance, not only is job of web developer made considerably easier but users get a more coherent and integrated experience when browsing web.

Accessibility Widespread use of standards (or even enforced use as in Highway Code) has another important benefit that is no less important and is almost a reason on its own to conform. A well designed standard will promote access to system to as wide an audience as possible. Consider disabled drivers - without provision of disabled parking spaces and standard that you shouldn't park in them unless you have an orange badge, road system would be much less accessible to people with physical difficulties. Likewise W3C standards all derive some input from Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C-WAI) that ensures that all web content will be accessible by those with sight problems or motor-control difficulties. On a practical level this involves, amongst other things, providing a textual alternative to all images, ensuring that site will work with a screen-reader (which is a program that can speak words for blind users) and is easy to navigate without use of a mouse.

You can check your site for W3C-WAI compliance at http://valet.webthing.com/access/online.html.

Persistence Already we are finding problem of reading some of our older digital data difficult. Ancient, creaking mainframes with large amounts of tape storage are now all but extinct yet there still exists need to read some of information stored by those systems. If that system conformed to a well known standard then there is every chance that data can be read by obtaining a copy of standard and applying its rules to your tapes. However if system was custom built with no standards in place at all, and original system no longer exists then you have increased difficulty of problem by several orders of magnitude. The moral here is that conforming to standards not only guarantees far-reaching accessibility for your data today, but in future as well.

As some form of W3C-WAI compliance is now a legal responsibility in UK (see http://www.web-access.org.uk/) as well as much of rest of world, need for adopting standards has never been more pressing.

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