Web Standards

Standards compliance in the production of websites is important for a number of reasons.

Improved Accessibility

Firstly, accessibility to a wide audience is guaranteed. By carefully structuring and coding your website, we can ensure that people with visual disabilities can access the content on your site just as able-bodied people can. In practice, this means the code we use to write the pages of your website can be understood by screen-readers and modern web browsers alike, with no loss of context or message.

Increased Audience

Accessibility also means making the content of your site accessible to people browsing the internet through devices like mobile phones and PDA’s. Standards compliant production ensures that your website can be read and viewed by the largest audience possible.

Improved Search Engine Rankings

Standards compliant production is also about using structural markup to describe your web page. This makes it easier for search engines like Google and Yahoo to index your page, and provide more accurate search results determined by the actual content on the page. Google and Yahoo both reward websites that are built using structural and semantic markup.

To give an example, this website is built using standards compliant XHTML and CSS. Viewing some of the referring page details (how people find this website), shows that many visitors come through Google and Yahoo. We recently added a new section to the website covering virtual tours and objects. Within 3 days of adding this page, it was number 1 on Google under ‘virtual tours and objects’.

Future-proof

Standards compliance also removes the need to write clumsy, browser-specific code, which only shortens the life-span of the website and increases development time. By adhering to industry-wide standards, your website is guaranteed to function correctly in future version of web browsers.

Our Commitment to Web Standards

As website developers and designers, we recognise our responsibility to develop using web standards and will ensure your website fits with the criteria set by the W3C.