WebHosting Blog » Blog Archive » why you should care about Web standards

why you should care about Web standards

Author bob on March 15th, 2008

Here are 4 reasons why you should care about Web standards; however the benefit is much more than what illustrated here while you make your website web standards compliance.

1. Search Engine Optimization Initiative

The search engine spiders find easier to index site, and the clean and valid code, Also the Google sitemaps protocol has become a de-facto Web standard. Standards help users by reducing load time, search engines prefer websites that are built with accessibility in mind.

2. Accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of making website content available to everyone, including users with disabilities. As an additional benefit to making site content more accessible to specific audience, Accessible websites avoid putting important information in images, make good use of alt tags, avoid using PDFs for everything, limit the use of JavaScript and tables, and more.

3. Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Websites that are built upon standards are easier to update and maintain in the long run. Semantic code, where the information is marked as to its purpose or meaning rather than its appearance, makes redesigns less costly. Bandwidth costs for high-traffic websites can be significantly reduced due to the smaller file sizes usually achievable with table less code (ESPN rebuilt their website and estimated a savings of 2 Terabytes per day in bandwidth).

4. Cross-browser, Cross-platform, Cross-device Compatibility

By building websites to adhere to standards, your chances improve of having your website perform well in multiple web browsers, on multiple operating systems, and even on multiple devices which are trendy these days.