designing with web standards
what are web standards?
Web standards are standardized specifications for the code or markup languages that are used to develop web sites such as XHTML, CSS, DOM and XML. The World Wide Web Consortium {W3C} publishes recommendations for these markup languages and is the most important organization working on web standards today.
why are web standards important?
The W3C outlines some of the major benefits of hiring a firm that employs web standards in their article Buy Standards Compliant Web Sites. It is imperative for any company to hire a web development firm to make sure the company uses web standards and modern coding techniques such as table-less layouts. Why? Table-based layouts make updates and future modifications time consuming and error prone. Here are some more advantages to designing websites using web standards:
- Accessibility: Using web standards goes a long way to ensure your site will be usable on non-traditional displays such as mobile phones, PDAs, and devices used by people with disabilities.
- Faster Loading: Well-structured web pages that separate the content from the look-and-feel of the site are more compact than convoluted table-based designs, resulting in faster load times and lower bandwidth usage.
- Search Engine Rankings: Well structured content makes it much easier for search engines to read your website, which translates into higher rankings, more traffic, and more customers.
- Maintenance: Maintenance is a snap with a well-coded and organized site. Sites that don’t use web standards tend to get harder to update over time and that translates into higher maintenance costs. Also, because well coded sites are more flexible, adding new areas to your site that you may not have considered at the time of the initial design cost a lot less too.
web standards and station four
We at Station Four are very enthusiastic about web standards, CSS-based design, and clean code. The philosophy of multi-layered architecture is very much embeded in our design philosophy from how we separate our style (CSS), content (HTML) and behavior (JavaScript) but also in how we design our sites in the .net framework using master pages, themes, and user controls in addition to employing multi-tiered web development which separates the data, business logic and presentation layers in constructing scalable and fast-performing applications.