So, your advertising agency or in-house marketing team presents you with a stellar, on the mark design for your new website. You’re very excited and tell them to move forward and make it live asap. But wait! You may be missing something…or someone, like a huge chunk of your target audience. What am I talking about? Your new best friend, Web Standards.

Let me introduce you to Web Standards. Web Standards, of course, has a formal definition which we’ll introduce later. First let me start by explaining to you what Web Standards means to you, and more importantly, your consumer. Using web standards means that everyone (the important part of “everyone” is your target market, of course) can see your gorgeous site just the way that you see it (no matter what browser or electronic web viewing device they’re using). It also means that your target audience can view your website just as fast and find it just as easily as you can. Does this Web Standards stuff sound important now? If so, read on.

There are countless ways to develop the back-end of a website, and with so many different options what makes one programming technique better than the next? In this blog I will try to explain the advantages of having your website designed and developed using current Web Standards and how that will help your site stand apart from that of your competitors. Okay, now for the techy stuff (Warning: In order to prevent your eyes from glossing over, you may want to pass off the remainder of this post to your trusted web programmer).

What are Web Standards?

Web Standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building websites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

As the World Wide Web has evolved, there have been different browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari, to name of few of the most popular) with different specifications and no standardized set of rules for design. This led to an increasing number of sites with code that was virtually impossible for the browsers to pick through for search result ranking purposes. As more and more sites were being developed with inconsistent and unorganized code, a grass-roots movement was started to develop standards for the web. Hello Web Standards! This movement created The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C, along with other groups and standards bodies, dedicated themselves to developing such Web Standards because this is what our brand new friend Web Standards does, ”…simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.” – Web Standards Group. Don’t you agree that we should all have a friend like him?

“Go W3C and Web Standards!”, right? Wrong! There’s one small problem…Because the Web Standards movement was driven by primarily the freelancer, small businesses and institutions, many large web development companies do not promote or advertise their use of Web Standards. Unfortunately, this lack of big business support has slowed the growth of Web Standards and thus slowed the process of this information trickling down to the common website consumer.

Here at {e} house, we are strong supporters of the Web Standards movement. And we are doing our best to inform the consumer of these standards in order to make their site as functional (for the widest audience) as possible. Here’s a detailed list of what Web Standards has to offer: (Again, beware of techy jargon overload!)

The Benefits

• Less Bandwidth Intense:
  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has allowed website designers and developers to streamline the process of writing web programming code. By building your site using CSS, you are able to significantly reduce the size and load time of your site. This will greatly increase the performance of large sites. Even smaller sites will benefit, as pages will load much faster for users. The reason that CSS layouts load quicker than non-CSS pages is because once the CSS file has been cached, all of the page styles and images have been loaded. Each page after the initial load will only need to load that page’s unique content.

• Extensibility:
  There is a CSS reference site that is a perfect example of what well planned CSS is capable of. CSSZenGarden demonstrates that it is possible to change the look and feel of a website completely without touching the code that builds the site and only editing the CSS page.

• Ease of Maintenance:
  Because websites do require change and maintenance, CSS standards driven sites make it very easy for any developer to get into and make changes. It used to be that sites were built with nested tables and inline styles that made it nearly impossible to read. If the site was new to the person making the changes, they were up for a huge challenge. Now, a well documented CSS layout is easy for a developer that is new to the site to jump in and make the changes. This definitely means a smaller maintenance and changes bill for the owner of the site.

• Compatibility (with newer browsers and mobile devices)
  This is something we call forward compatibility. This means that any website that is designed and built the correct way can be viewed correctly on multiple browsers, platforms, and internet devices. The beauty of standards is that a site built using them will continue to work on different browsers even as current browsers evolve and new browsers are introduced.

• Accessibility:
  Valid code does not necessarily mean that your website will be completely accessible for the disabled, but many feel it’s a good place to start.

Phew! If you were able to get through that list, you are probably ready to write Web Standards into your will…. Now I have a little wrench to throw into your plans. It’s Web Standard’s enemy, Flash. As you have probably noticed, Flash is an extremely common element used in many websites. But Flash is not Web Standards compliant. The idea of using a plug-in on your Internet browser to view content on a website is against Web Standards. Does that mean that you should never use Flash? Probably not. We often use Flash elements in our client sites and even our own. The key is knowing how Flash will display in different browsers and how to address browsers that don’t support Flash (such as Safari Mobile).

Our Suggestions

So, here’s our suggestion to you. Embrace Web Standards as your friend and be sure to introduce him to your favorite web designer (If your pick web designer is {e}, you won’t have to). As Jeffrey Zeldman, founder of Happy Cog Studios, said “Standards are vital to any medium. Because the software through which the web is viewed finally supports standards, it makes sense to learn and correctly use them. Doing so saves time and money, reduces overhead, extends the usable life of our sites, and provides greater access to our content.” That sounds like something we can all relate to.