Business Benefits of Web Standards

1 March 2007
Web standards are the future of web development. This article discussing some of the business benefits of having your website developed using web standard.

There are some designers who struggle to make a business case for web standards to their superiors, clients and prospects. Maybe we are doing the wrong thing in trying to sell the idea of standards based web design. Web standards are the next evolutionary step in web design, and are there to make the web work better for everyone. We probably shouldn't be so concerned with selling standards, but should be incorporating them into our projects so we can best serve our website visitors, nobody can argue with that can they? If people still need some convincing, there are many business benefits of web standards to tell them about.

Separation of Content and Presentation

Older websites or those built without using web standards were usually built in a way that meant the presentational code was part of the HTML. This causes major headaches when for instance site wide presentational changes were required. Unfortunately, some poor soul would find they had to trudge through the entire site adjusting the styles in order to meet the new brief.

Web standards promote a clear separation of structure, presentation and behavior. HTML is used to structure the document, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used for presentation and JavaScript for any client side scripting. Using this approach, making presentational and behavioral changes is quite a simple process. Changing colours, text sizes, margins etc would mean updating one file (the CSS file) and seeing that change persisted across the site as a whole with no need to edit each file individually.

More Maintainable Code

Having clear separation means website maintenance is simplified. Gone are the nested tables, masses of spacer images and inline style tags like Font and Center. They are now replaced with simple semantic markup linked to a CSS file. This means a lot less code to deal with, making it much simpler to make changes across the board, reducing maintenance as a whole, thus saving money and resources.

Forward Compatibility

Adopting web standards now, means your site(s) will be ready for the future. Older web browsers were very lenient on the way it displayed invalid content. As the development of newer, more standards compliant web browsers evolves, invalid markup will be treated differently and the browsers may not be so lenient in their rendition of your website, meaning it could look nothing like you expected it to look. Using valid, standards compliant markup will ensure your site will never fall foul to this. Current and future browsers will be able to render your markup with no problems whatsoever.

Improved Search Engine Ranking

Having a standards compliant website will not guarantee you a number one spot in Google, but it does help the search engines move around your site. Your reward for creating a site that search engines find easy to index means a naturally higher search engine ranking.

Basis for Accessibility

Standards have been created with accessibility in mind. Creating a web page using web standards means you already have basis for accessibility compliance.

Improved User Experience

Because our pages are now smaller and contain far less HTML they are far quicker to download. Faster, more responsive websites will naturally increase the general visitor usability, meaning they will not become frustrated waiting for content to load and click off your site.

Benefits Summary

- Clear separation between structure, presentation and behavior
- Semantic structure to markup (HTML)
- Easier and cheaper maintenance
- Future Proofed
- Improved Search Engine Ranking
- Good basis for accessibility
- Smaller pages, faster downloads
- Faster page downloads
- Increased usability
- Saves money!

The benefits of web standards are tangible, and designing websites in this way will in the short and longer term have a positive impact on visitor web experiences. Whether you are a developer who needs to convince your superiors that web standards are the way forward, or you have to explain the benefits to clients or prospects, web standards are the future of web development, and their benefits are there for all to see.