oswebdesign.co.uk Blog

Why should a website be compliant with standards?

People often tell me they have a “friend” who is technically-minded and who has offered to design their site for them for next to nothing. So why should they go for a professional web designer?

Understandably most people don’t know what professional web design involves or how long it takes. A professional web designer spends time perfecting the detail and will develop a website which is compliant with standards and understandably charges accordingly for his or her time.

Comparing the two, you need to understand the web standards issue. Here are just some of the benefits of standards compliance:

Protecting your website

For web pages to display correctly within a browser, they need to validate.  Those which don’t validate rely on error correction by the browser itself and the concern is that future browsers may not work in the same way they do now, resulting in a website “breaking” as technology moves on.  Due to the fact browsers are built to comply with existing standards it is vital your new website  is compliant.

A standards compliant site will not only improve search engine visibility but can help with performance.   As a standards compliant site is error-free, the pages contained within it are far more likely to be indexed.  Like browsers, search engines use error correction on pages which don’t validate but there is no way of  knowing how a search engine will treat an error – it could index just a specific part of a page or even miss out certain pages completely.  Web pages which validate are found by a browser more quickly than those containing errors.

A standards compliant site helps ensure your website is accessible.  Despite your site containing all the relevant coding to allow disabled users to view it, one error in a page could mean it is not accessible at all.