RSS FeedWhat Web standards are, the benefits and why it is important to you
Thursday, October 27th, 2005
The goal is to produce clean, efficient and easy to use standards compliant web sites. With a focus on web standards under which include SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Web site usability and most of all Web site accessibility. What does this all mean? Lets find out:
W3C Web Standards:
The W3C is the organizing group that gives the specification for Web standards and guidelines that basically make the foundation for good usability, accessibility, SEO and browser friendly design among many other things. The structure used to create web standards compliant pages consist of building a site with proper web standards technologies such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and semantic XHTML markup. Using this model allows you to separate the content of the site from the presentation of the site. You are able to modify anywhere from a single design element to the entire look of a web site via editing one or two CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files.Benefits of using web standards & CSS/XHTML structured pages include:
- Between 30-70% file size reduction
- In contrast to table based sited layouts which contain multiple nested and bloated table code to define structure which is downloaded on every page, CSS layouts only download the layout defining CSS file once. Thus resulting in a much reduced file size per page as the style design & layout do not have to be downloaded on every page.
- Reduced bandwidth costs
- Loading of web pages becomes much faster with smaller sizes, cleaner code & structured content. Pages become more responsive and quicker thus creating a snappier, more usable and pleasing experience for the end user.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- There are many out there who don’t know exactly what search engine optimization means. Some would think the name itself is self explanatory but what does it really mean? Making a website search engine optimized is simply semantically structuring the site and its content in a manner that allows search engines to spider/index the contents of a website easily and efficiently. This gives a website better ranking on searc h engines on searches for relevant content and exposing it to a large web audience. By using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to dictate the style, design and presentation of a site and semantic XHTML markup to distinguish the content you can achieve this.