| Website Designers & Web Standards |
There are many advantages to both website designers and owners in the adherence to web standards......including financial and competitive benefits.
With most Internet browser software having differing levels of standard implementation, and the increase in web access methods (i.e. mobile, PDA, etc.), adjusting or editing websites to satisfy the display needs of each is becoming increasingly difficult and time consuming. Following website design standards is a major step towards solving this problem. Many more browsers, (other than Internet Explorer & Firefox), are being used to browse and surf the web. These Internet browsers span across a number of operating systems (i.e. Windows, Mac, & Linux), and are built using a variety of layout engines. There are more than seven layout engines, with the four main ones being;
So overall, there are in excess of seven different rendering engines used by dozens of Internet browsers, on three different operating systems/platforms. In such an increasingly heterogeneous environment, testing each web page in every configuration is becoming increasingly difficult. Making websites “standards-compliant” assists in presenting sites properly across traditional, new, and unusual browsers; and as such, coding to web standards is really the only practical solution. This article discusses how adhering to website design standards, rather than using proprietary markup and technologies, can contribute to a company's business goals. web Standards BenefitsThere are many benefits of adhering to the standards for website design and development. In general a website that has been built to conform to web standards will:
If a website has been designed to be in keeping with the guidelines and recommendations put forward by the standards consortiums, (i.e. it has correct HTML, CSS, Javascript and design methodologies), these tangible benefits translate to financial and commercial advantages. Better Quality sitesThe web standards promote a better quality of website programming and design. Following the standards leads to the design of professional websites that are free from bugs and errors, in addition to the resultant HTML and CSS based designs being cleaner and more efficient.Lower cost of productionDesigning and building to the Web standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production. Using Web standards assists browsers to display the website properly, without time-consuming individual browser-centric rewrites. Otherwise inconsistencies between browsers in a high-end site feature can absorb the developers in hours of frustrating forum hunting and bug fixing.Improved branding & user experienceWebsites that are designed with the Web standards and best practices in mind will work more uniformly across different browsers and platforms. This is important for the usability of the website as well as promoting a consistent corporate image and brand. In addition, websites developed with the Web Standards should continue to function correctly as Internet browsers evolve, and also as new Internet devices come to market.More Accessible & larger audiencesAdherence to standards improves the “accessibility” of your website. Accessibility not only increases website usability by assisting older, newer and unusual browsers to understand your documents and display the content of your website properly, but it can also provide your website content to a larger audience. This includes making it easier for older users and those with disabilities, impairments, or poor vision to gain access to the content. An important aspect of website accessibility includes colour analysis where contrast and luminosity of text needs to be above certain levels to ensure readability for these users as a standard practice.Search Engine indexing & rankingsWebsite pages that conform to the standards are easier for search engines to access, index, and rank. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easier for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents more accurately. A low “code to content” ratio can also improve the chances for greater visibility in web searches. Less codeWebsites designed around the Web Standards can use up to 50% less code, as the HTML code is often much more compact when used in conjunction with CSS. The main reason for this is that most of the page formatting is stripped from the HTML tags and attributes and placed into simpler CSS classes. CSS-based layouts are used instead of the code-heavy table-based layouts. Less bandwidthWith standards compliant websites, only one or a few style sheets are used for the whole website. So not only is there less HTML code per page, but the style sheets only need to be load once for the whole site and thereafter they are loaded from the cache. Whilst the payload might be slightly higher for the first page, the savings in bandwidth on the subsquent pages of the website, over many visits, are huge.Displays fasterBecause your page uses less bandwidth, separates out layered code areas, and uses much less HTML markup and code, it also means it loads and renders much faster. It also saves time if web browsers do not have to interpret malformed or invalid HTML and make rendering assumptions. Websites built by inferior web development software, junior developers without a complete knowledge of the standards, or by untrained offshore labor, generate what is known as "tag soup" web pages. "Tag soup" websites force browsers like Internet Explorer, to use a "quirks mode" rendering engine, which interprets code, rather than just rendering the code. What this means is longer time to display your pages and much slower "rendering" times of your page. Using cleaner XHTML markup and compliant website pages that validate against a Doctype or standards-based schema, will result in the pages loading much faster. Combined with less code overall, and natural browser caching, the website pages will display very efficiently. easier to maintainWebsite design standards also make it easy for web designers or developers to understand code that could have been developed by other design teams. This makes it easier to enhance or edit the design or code if required to do so in the future.In SummaryDue to Internet browsers having implementing incomplete standards, website designers and developers have had to provide individual browser-centric solutions to ensure that web pages are displayed properly across multiple browsers. Adherence to web standards helps address this problem as browsers get closer to fully implementing the current standards and become "standard compliant". There are distinct benefits to both website designers and the business that owns the website from using website standards; and these translate to financial and competitive advantages that increase the ROI.
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