by Mike McKeown
Any qualified web designer has heard about web standards and has been told that they should use them, but the question is why? Below are some good reasons to build all of your websites using web standards and valid code:
- Make your (or your client’s) business look professional.
- It takes less time to do work using web standards. Site maintenance is quicker and easier when using standards-compliant code.
- Using standards increases accessibility meaning more people (especially with some kind of handicap) can view your website. More visitors is always good.
- Faster loading time which leads to decreased bandwidth usage. Standards-compliant table-less code is slimmer which means your site will load faster and you will use less bandwidth.
- Higher search engine ranking. Search engines rank sites that follow web standards higher.
- Nested tables are a pain to edit, and easy to mess up. Want to take a few cells out of a table nested inside a table nested inside a table? Good luck finding and editing the right code in a mess of nested tables. You can easily mess up your entire page if you are not careful.
- Code that is standards-compliant has less cross-browser issues.
- Its the right way to build a website. You wouldn’t build a house with faulty support beams, so why would you build a site with faulty code?
These are just a few good reasons to use standards-complaint code. For more information visit the W3C.