Why your business benefits from adhering to
web standardsWeb standards are created to give benefits to developer and visitor. As a business, your website must be accessible, usable, attractive and convey a message of trust and professionalism. Getting this right can be both expensive and difficult if done outside of W3 standards.
Let's look at main benefits of web standards.
Accessibility
Valid XHTML and CSS will ensure that a site is constructed in a way that seperates content from presentation.
There are huge business gains to be had from this method such as less maintenance, more control, lower costs etc., but importantly, accessible content. Not everyone uses a common browser to access web and a valid site will mean your information will have widest potential audience.
Usability
Semantic markup creates a usable website. We have all seen cluttered sites with no per-page focus, navigation that leads you into abyss and forces URL amendments as well as document structure that makes a web page unreadable and hard to follow. You have a point to make. Every page has a focus and content is clear. Web standards will ensure that people get to point of your site, quickly and effortlessly.
Compatibility
We are in 21st century and there are now a wider range of platforms, devices and browsers than ever before. More and more people are accessing internet and due to this diversity, building a website by following guidelines is only way to ensure uniformity.
Substantially increased performance
By removing formatting from markup, you can reduce file sizes of your website which means people with slower connections or users from around globe have a better browsing experience. Using tables for layout can sometimes treble file sizes as positioning requires attributes to table cells and occasionally invisble images forcing layouts to look "correct". CSS can acheive this and more from a light weight text file that when cached, will not need reloading further increasing performance.
