Why we use web standards and what it means for you

Using web standards is extremely important in the design of your website. Using them will help to ‘future-proof' your website and ensure that it is not only likely to work harder for you as a marketing tool, but will probably save you money in the future.

Here's a little background so you can understand how this all works…

In the beginning, the Internet was primarily a medium for academics, researchers, and the military to share information. However, it didn't take long for entrepreneurial visionaries to realise that this new medium was ideal for selling everything from fresh produce and dogfood to used cars and streaming sports coverage.

However, as with any medium in its infancy, the early Internet was aesthetically ‘crude' (and not really all that enticing to consumers) until it was discovered that placing images and data in tables could enhance the visual impact of the page…

The problem with tables is that they:

mix presentational data in with your content.
This makes the file sizes of your pages unnecessarily large , as users must download this presentational data for each page they visit.
You therefore need to use more bandwidth (more money).
This makes redesigns of existing sites and content extremely labour intensive (and expensive ).
It also makes it very hard (and expensive) to maintain visual consistency throughout a site.
Table-based pages are also much less accessible to users with disabilities and viewers using cell phones and PDAs to access the Web.

The good news is that there is an alternative. Modern browsers are much better at rendering Web standards and we don't need to use these archaic methods any more.

Instead of using tables we can use much simpler code and cascading style sheets (CSS) to separate the design from the content resulting in websites that are faster to load, easier to redesign, and more accessible to everyone (including Google).

Coding our pages using XHTML and CSS has several advantages:

By removing presentational code from pages, redesigns of existing sites and content is much less labour intensive (and much less expensive ). To change the layout of the site, all you need to do is change the style sheets rather than needing to edit the pages themselves.
Using Web standards reduces the file sizes of your pages, as users no longer need to download presentational data with each page they visit. The style sheets that control layout are cached by viewers' browsers.
Reduced file size means faster loads and lower hosting costs.
Using Web standards also makes it extremely easy to maintain visual consistency throughout a site. Since pages use the same CSS document for their layout, they are all formatted the same. This strengthens your brand and makes your site more usable.
Using Web standards makes our pages much more accessible to users with disabilities and to viewers using mobile phones and PDAs to access the Web.

Visitors using screen readers (as well as those with slow connections) do not have to wade through countless table cells and spacers to get at the actual content of our pages. In other words, separating content from the way it is presented makes your content device-independent.
Reducing the ratio of code to content in this way also makes the website far more visible to search engines and helps the site establish better search engine results.

Hopefully you now have a good grasp of the importance of web standards and why we take so much care to ensure that our websites comply.

For further information about anything in this factsheet, email us at create@azuremarketing.com. To view a complete range of factsheets, go to our Resources section at www.azuremarketing.com.

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