Web Design standards should be the guiding light behind the work of any web design or web development professional. Web Design standards provide a template against which you measure the quality, structure, syntax and methodology of any web design project.
To explain the benefits of web standards, visit this post to see what we're talking about. Questions related to multiple browser compliance and the need for testing extensively before launching still haunt most web developers, but the standardization of HTML, CSS and a few other technologies has made the web world a more predictable place to design.
When coding a standards-compliant website, we can be very sure that it will render the same in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and perhaps even IE (version 7 and up). Inconsistencies are bound to crop up, and do, but anyone who stands on either side of the past decade of web design in Chicago and web development will recognize the golden value of web design and development standards.
As a community of developers, we welcome standards and encourage others to embrace them as well. We write validated, semantic code, and occasionally have in-depth discussions (Tom and Shakeel can attest to this) about how we should and shouldn't format our CSS and HTML. The UGLY truth is that the average client doesn't care. Remember this. Joe client is not looking for a compliant website, but for an effective and money-making website. The web designers at Integraphix, a Chicago web design company, cringe at this.
There are exceptions to every rule, and you might be lucky enough to get a client who demands that their website is standardized to the point that it will work in every browser on every platform and device - lucky you! They've probably overheard it from somewhere else, but it's all the same.
For the most part though, this client is not looking to hire a designer that can meet all W3C recommended standards. Chances are...they don't know what W3C is. Rather, your client is looking for a website designer that helps him achieve his main objective to either sell more products, share information about his company or bring people with a common interest together. He'll certainly be more concerned with that than having a website than having a compliant website design. As for us here in Chicago, we like our web design compliant. But that's just us.
The ultimate problem: Do we throw away all standards to give the client what he wants? NO! Standards are a critical aspect of web design in chicago and the world and should be a large part of the web design we do for clients, even if they dont necessarily care about them.
The Benefits of W3C Compliant Website Design:
Accessibility
This is about creating website that can be used and navigated by users with disabilities. The most common finding is making content recognizable to screen reading software or text-to-braille hardware. This poses a great benefit to clients. Most clients won't or can't understand that such technologies essentially parse the HTML document and return the content in a format that can be easily understood by the disabled user. Compliant code will make the document structure function properly and make the client's website more accessible.
Future-Proofing
While the web is constantly changing, clients usually will not want to pay for an entirely new website design and coding after a couple of years because of outdated code. Big browsers will typically do their best to make their rendering engines compatible to backwards code (HTML5 has the concept built into it actually!!) the future-proofing methods of web design and code standards WILL appeal to clients. It saves them money in the long run and their website will continue to look good 5, 10, 15 years from now.
Improved Performance
Even the most non-tech or internet savvy client will recognize how a slow website can damage their business. Utilizing web standards will help this! The guideline to separate content and presentation (HTML and CSS) was not established by purists out of snobbery. It IS the best way to create a good website. Embedding style mark-up on every page creates a lot of slag and drives page sizes up - including the amount of information users need to download in order to look at your website. Not Good.
By moving style code to a cache-able CSS file and getting rid of TABLES and other useless mark-up, you will make the website responsive and user-friendly. Something no client can complain about. Doing this also reduces bandwidth.
Simple Maintenance
The benefits that come with having a website that is standards compliant (and the most appealing to clients) is that it requires less maintenance and therefore less time billed to the developer. A messy website requires a lot of upkeep, especially when things break due to bad code and structuring. A compliant website can be tweaked and live in a much shorter amount of time than a non-compliant website.
Search Engine Optimization
Currently there is no real consensus on how compliant coding helps or hinders SEO - but standards certainly don't hinder. A messy website is not easily readable by spider bots, and therefore, any SEO that's gone into the website. Practicing web design and development standards will potentially help SEO efforts because the site structure is clean, readable, and easy for the search engines to index. If you don't believe us, take a look at Aaron Walter's suggestions from "Findability and SEO Cheat Sheet: a Guide to Web Standards SEO".
Aaron says:
When coding a standards-compliant website, we can be very sure that it will render the same in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and perhaps even IE (version 7 and up). Inconsistencies are bound to crop up, and do, but anyone who stands on either side of the past decade of web design in Chicago and web development will recognize the golden value of web design and development standards.
As a community of developers, we welcome standards and encourage others to embrace them as well. We write validated, semantic code, and occasionally have in-depth discussions (Tom and Shakeel can attest to this) about how we should and shouldn't format our CSS and HTML. The UGLY truth is that the average client doesn't care. Remember this. Joe client is not looking for a compliant website, but for an effective and money-making website. The web designers at Integraphix, a Chicago web design company, cringe at this.
There are exceptions to every rule, and you might be lucky enough to get a client who demands that their website is standardized to the point that it will work in every browser on every platform and device - lucky you! They've probably overheard it from somewhere else, but it's all the same.
For the most part though, this client is not looking to hire a designer that can meet all W3C recommended standards. Chances are...they don't know what W3C is. Rather, your client is looking for a website designer that helps him achieve his main objective to either sell more products, share information about his company or bring people with a common interest together. He'll certainly be more concerned with that than having a website than having a compliant website design. As for us here in Chicago, we like our web design compliant. But that's just us.
The ultimate problem: Do we throw away all standards to give the client what he wants? NO! Standards are a critical aspect of web design in chicago and the world and should be a large part of the web design we do for clients, even if they dont necessarily care about them.
The Benefits of W3C Compliant Website Design:
Accessibility
This is about creating website that can be used and navigated by users with disabilities. The most common finding is making content recognizable to screen reading software or text-to-braille hardware. This poses a great benefit to clients. Most clients won't or can't understand that such technologies essentially parse the HTML document and return the content in a format that can be easily understood by the disabled user. Compliant code will make the document structure function properly and make the client's website more accessible.
Future-Proofing
While the web is constantly changing, clients usually will not want to pay for an entirely new website design and coding after a couple of years because of outdated code. Big browsers will typically do their best to make their rendering engines compatible to backwards code (HTML5 has the concept built into it actually!!) the future-proofing methods of web design and code standards WILL appeal to clients. It saves them money in the long run and their website will continue to look good 5, 10, 15 years from now.
Improved Performance
Even the most non-tech or internet savvy client will recognize how a slow website can damage their business. Utilizing web standards will help this! The guideline to separate content and presentation (HTML and CSS) was not established by purists out of snobbery. It IS the best way to create a good website. Embedding style mark-up on every page creates a lot of slag and drives page sizes up - including the amount of information users need to download in order to look at your website. Not Good.
By moving style code to a cache-able CSS file and getting rid of TABLES and other useless mark-up, you will make the website responsive and user-friendly. Something no client can complain about. Doing this also reduces bandwidth.
Simple Maintenance
The benefits that come with having a website that is standards compliant (and the most appealing to clients) is that it requires less maintenance and therefore less time billed to the developer. A messy website requires a lot of upkeep, especially when things break due to bad code and structuring. A compliant website can be tweaked and live in a much shorter amount of time than a non-compliant website.
Search Engine Optimization
Currently there is no real consensus on how compliant coding helps or hinders SEO - but standards certainly don't hinder. A messy website is not easily readable by spider bots, and therefore, any SEO that's gone into the website. Practicing web design and development standards will potentially help SEO efforts because the site structure is clean, readable, and easy for the search engines to index. If you don't believe us, take a look at Aaron Walter's suggestions from "Findability and SEO Cheat Sheet: a Guide to Web Standards SEO".
Aaron says:
- Your mark-up should not contain errors that make the web page difficult for a search engine to index. Validate your mark-up with W3C's validation tool.
- Write semantically meaningful mark-up. This means using tags as they were intended and in a way that reflects the content rather than their style.
- Write intelligible title tags beginning with the page name, then the website name, then a short keyword rich phrase that describes the website.
- Use heading tags with relevant keywords to identify the key sections of your pages. Put heading tags in order of importance starting with H1 (for example - the website or organization name.)
It is reasonable that compliance to standards would help a website's SEO for the same reasons that it would make it future-proof. As search algorithms improve, compliant website will naturally remain readable and messy website, no matter how much SEO, will become unreadable.
Make sure your clients know that SEO should not be done at the expense of website design and coding standards. Anything that breaks standards is little more than a quick fix for somewhat fleeting results - not a forward thinking strategy to maintain visibility.
Conclusion
While your special client doesn't care about standards in the end, he will be receptive to many concrete benefits it would bring to his business. You are the one that has to explain those to him. You must explain that adhering to web standards will make his website faster, more accessible and easier to keep up. It will also make it 'future-proof' and naturally more findable. If you can help your client to understand these things, they'll be more excited about W3C standardizing than you!
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