BigGiantCrayon Network

Design by Standards

When we first discovered the W3C standards for HTML/XHTML/CSS we were curious as to how hard it was going to be to develop websites to a standard.  Surely it would be easier just to code things as quickly as possible, get the website up and running and then move on.  But the W3C standards showed us some valuable insights into web development, and future proofing.  We started early on in www.purple-pixels.co.uk, by following the standards, first we started with HTML 4.01 and later XHMTL.  The validation pages have, many times, found errors quickly and easily, sometimes helping us considerably tracking down coding mistakes (we all make mistakes).

Designing and developing websites to the W3C standards has also helped us considerably, when new browsers are released.  So far, touch wood, with the release of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3 and Google Chrome (v1 and the beta for v2), NONE of our web sites needed any changes to work with the new browsers.  We have put this down to our clean and W3C standard coded websites.

This brings me onto my next advantage of coding to the W3C standards.  SEO, from what we have discovered if you follow the standards, it also helps search engines find and read your site.  And it doesn’t make it any harder for the users to read the site either, which isn’t really a bad thing, considering that, usually, users are the main reason we make websites.