Business benefits of web standard design

Before you hire a website design agency to design your website ask yourself this, do they offer you real business benefits? like

  • Search engine friendly pages
  • Return on investment
  • Preparing you for the future
  • Increasing your exposure on search engines.
  • Staying ahead of the competition

We are talking about web standard, its all about the search engine now days what is the purpose of owning a website if no one can find you against billions of websites? To help you understand where web standards came from, some history is helpful. Many web pages are actually designed for older browsers. Why? Browsers have continually evolved since the www started. New ones have appeared and old ones have disappeared (remember Netscape?). Another complicating factor is that different browser makers (like Microsoft) tend to have their browsers interpret html/xhtml in slightly different ways.

This has lead to web designers having to design their websites to support older browsers rather than new ones. It’s often decided that the web page needs to appear properly to these “legacy” browsers. Web standards put into place a common set of “rules” for all web browsers to use to show a web page. The main organization pushing these standards is the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), whose Director, Tim Berners-Lee has the distinction of actually inventing the world wide web in 1989.

So now we have a basic understanding on web standard, other factors to consider is how a website designer organise their page content we call this search engine friendly pages. You need to make sure that you have:

  • Themed pages
  • Good semantic markup
  • Small page sizes
  • Small amount of Javascript or flash
  • Meaningful graphics and no graphics as text

That but to name a few. The most effective way to achieve these is to design web pages to current W3C standards, and keeping web standard in mind. The use of CSS in particular to separate content for presentation is highly effective in meeting these goals.

Things you should avoid

  • Text presented in graphics
  • Excessive JavaScript
  • Excessive Flash
  • Browser Incompatibility
  • Page titles with low search engine visibility

Whether it be a $500 dollar website or a $10,000 website designing with web standard plays an important role, so the next time you are thinking about a new web site or a re design take web standard into consideration. We do

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