Advantages to Using Web Standards

There are many advantages to using Web Standards in your website. Web Standards is the new way of designing websites and webpages. It involves the use of CSS, accessibility, standardized markup, and semantic design of content in your web pages. But what are the advantages to using these standardized practices? The advantages are huge! For example, did you know that websites designed around CSS and XHTML use as much as 60% less markup and code per page on average? Did you know that your sites run better, faster, smoother and are more usable overall? These are just a few of the advantages. By using Web Standards and the practices behind them, you can greatly improve the overall quality of your web sites over time.

First of all, whenever you begin a new website or web page, you should consider implementing Web Standards in your initial architecture, so that you gain those advantages during the development life-cycle and implementation of your new site. Beware however, that you should be careful in how you choose third party vendor tools, components, development shops, and scripts that may look good visually, but which may not deliver standardized code practices in the web pages they create. Many immature IT shops, including many offshore and outsourced providers, often do not deliver such standardized practices or follow them as they build web applications and sites. The cost savings are not so great up front. But the overall cost saving over time, in almost every case, translate to large maintenace and troubleshooting expenses later. In many cases, overseas shops that claim to build quality web code, do not, simply because they do not have the experience, concern, sensitivity, or training in Web Standards. These qualities are often only available in more mature and experienced local web development markets. We know. We have worked with many outsourced providers. Upon code review, the code problems exist.

The same issues applies to third party components, which often look good in the browser, but do not address solid www.W3C.org standardized schemas or markup in the final codebase. Products like ImageIsland Professional 3.0 and MediaIsland Professional are good examples of products that offer a solid standardized product, which in turn, transfers many of the benefits of using Web Standards to the customers that buy and use those products in their websites.

In general, if you cannot find website scripts, products, vendors, or outsource teams that follow good web coding practices and Web Standards in the code they create, you are often better off coding a template page that follows Web Standards yourself, or hiring local talent that has the experience to work carefully with you on all facets and issues in your new Standardized Web initiatives. We have found that a seasoned web developer with many years experience in Web Standards can guide you in making good decisions long term with your web applications. A single individual, sensitive to the new Web Standards movement, is often a great investment (though hard to find). Such a person is often enough to assist you in laying the foundation for a solid high-quality codebase. Those decisions may take a little more time up front, and cost, but the payoff in quality, search engine ranking, code maintenance and accessibility will save you thousands of hours over the life of your web site, as a whole. Keep that cost-savings in mind when you choose to hire a local web developer or shop that has the sensitivity and experience with Web Standards to know what the cost savings are long term and which can help you understand the initial cost issues upfront in reaching those goals. You will find, based on our years of experience working with outsourced labor that does not have the necessary Web Standards skillsets, that the extra time and expense up front translates into huge gains in ROI and cost savings that bring great value to your overall website initiatives.

To make our point for using Web Standards in every facet of your website initiatives, we have listed the top ten advantages to using Web Standards below:

Top 10 Advantages to Using Web Standards in Your Website!

1. Cleaner Markup - Web Standards insist that you write clean, valid, modular and semantically correct markup. For example, "font" tags are no longer used to define font attributes of text- instead, it is defined by the style sheet (or rather, linked style sheets, when possible). By doing so, it simplifies the code and makes it easier for developers to troubleshoot and maintain. This also helps other devlopment members in an organization to easily understand and use the code and content correctly, since in many cases, it now doubles as XML data as well as HTML web site markup in the codebase.
2. Forward and Backward Compatibility - Web standards is not just about forward compatibility. It is true that it will ensure that your code works in current and future browsers. But it also caters to older browsers whereby your web page will degrade gracefully to produce an acceptable result in many older browsers and agents. Many might say - So What? Well, how does a 99.99% saturation and online market reach across your viewership sound, in comparison to designing a tag soup HTML site that works in Internet Explorer only (i.e. 60% reach?). Think about the number of users you lost due to sloppy HTML!
3. Accessibility - Web standards helps make the content accessible to a wider range of users, including those with disabilities, poor vision, older users, and those without the software or hardware to fully view all your website content. With the markup code being cleaner (XHTML, XML, etc), specialized devices for visually impaired users can read out the content. This also allows users to customize pages to their needs using style switches and provides a printer-friendly version of Web pages.
4. Cross Browsers and Platform Compatibility - Perhaps one of the most important reasons to shift to standard Web pages is that it helps avoid cross-browsers and platform issues. With XHTML's strict nature, your page is likely to be displayed correctly on all devices (computers, PDAs, mobile, etc.), or alternate future devices that use subsets of the markup (XHTML-basic, Aural Style Sheet readers, Projectors, RSS Readers, etc)
5. Better SEO (Search Engine Optimization and Ranking) - By complying with Web standards, you can achieve better search engine ranking, as your HTML/XHTML markup is now aligned perfectly with the content that holds it. For example, many developers typically abandon the h1 header tag for fancier formatting of titles and animations, when in fact, adding back in the older and more reliable h1 at the top of your page allows search engines to target the keywords you are trying to convey online to your readers. This translates into a much higher search engine ranking for that page on the World Wide Web. By using poor markup practices, your code becomes "tag soup" and cluttered. Overall, it will be harder for search engine spiders to locate and index your content correctly.
6. Easier Site Maintenance - By using CSS to separate content from presentation, alongside fewer HTML tags to hold the content inside the page, side-wide changes to that page and its content areas becomes much easier. For example, you will only have to your style sheet once at the top of a page using say, an include or usercontrol, rather than all pages. This separation of design, from content from structure also means less hours of maintenance to change any part of that structure in your new site, simply because those managed layers are now separated from each other, rather than mashed together.
7. Bandwidth Saving - Sites that get millions of hits a day generate gigabytes of download and bandwidth week to week. Thats a huge cost factor for many of the larger websites online these days! With less code and cached CSS files, you can save considerable bandwidth using Web Standards. For example, if your cached CSS file is about 3Kb per request and your site has an average of 10,000 page views per day, that's 10GB of bandwidth saved for an entire year! Now, that's a great savings for those paying big money for Web hosting fees and bandwidth.
8. Up to 60% Less Code! - Most websites built around Web Standards use up to 60% less code. The reason for this is because most of the formatting is stripped from the HTML tags and their attributes and placed into simpler CSS classes. In addition, simpler markup and a return to plain HTML tags for basic content blocks means much less wrapped content. You will also see much less use of tables for non-tabular data, meaning div's are used for most web page layouts. Such block-level elements means that the ratio of actual content on a typical page to the markup that holds it is much less. Think of all those crazy nested tables you no longer will need to use!
9. Faster Page Loads - Because your page uses less bandwidth, separates out layered code areas, and uses much less markup and code, it also means it loads much faster. And, it renders faster! Users will get a much better viewing experience when they see your site and that increases retention, ROI, and usability across the board! In many sites we have built, we have found that the newer browser engines, like Firefox 3, actually cache the complete web site interface and on refresh only load fresh content into a sub-section of the web page (much like AJAX!). This occurs because of browser caching of the cleaner XHTML markup and linked CSS files. So, besides faster rendering, you can get partial page rendering on refresh of pages, as well. When a page is also validated and well-formed, browsers do not have to interpret your bad markup and make rendering assumptions. That also saves time. Sites built by poor web dev software or untrained offshore labor, generates "tag soup" web pages, that force browsers like Internet Explorer, to use a "quirskmode" rendering engine, which interprets code, rather than just rendering the code. That means much slower views of your page. Using cleaner XHTML markup and compliant web site pages that validate against a Doctype or standards-based schema, the page will load much faster. Combined with less code overall, and natural browser caching, your users will get incredibly efficient web page displays!
10. Repurposable Content - One of the least known, but most powerful features of Web Standards, is the ability to "repurpose" the same web page content (HTML, XML or XHTML) into numerous alternate formats and data types for use by many different systems online. Its now possible to develop complete websites that not only deliver great HTML site pages to desktop browsers, but using the same content, deliver alternate views of the same content you manage on the web to other devices for consumption. For example, you could build your site around a simple XML data library and a matching XSLT and CSS library system to format those XML files. When these three items are sent to the browser, the browser simply builds the web page for you using the raw XML data combined with a transformation XSLT and CSS file for the design view. In this way, you could design XSLT files for say PDF files, or print-friendly sheets, or raw data for REST-based services or handheld views of your data, without the need for expensive and complicated third party services and components. In fact, Internet Explorer and many of the other browsers have supported this features since 2000! Its up to you to use the new Web Standards creatively to achieve this last but greatest advantage to using Web Standards in your next web site project.

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