Tabbyfied

A good article by Yuri Filimonov. Hope this can give a new insight to businessmen.

Taking web standards into account when designing a website may not be a primary concern for many site owners, but when it comes to finding an extra edge to improve their business, they are more than willing to do anything required to increase revenues. Let’s see how complying with Web standards can help a business website.

What are the Standards?

On the Web, the main standards are the languages used when creating websites. The most wide-spread ones are HTML, XHTML and CSS. HTML or XHTML are used to create the backbone of websites - the structure. (The difference between HTML and XHTML is that XHTML was formed from XML and is forward compatible.) CSS, in turn, is used to style, format and position the structure and content.

What is Web Standards Compliance?

Put simply, web standards compliance is using web languages correctly. This involves using HTML tags properly and the way they were and are intended to be used. For instance, one of the most common felonies against the web standards is using table tags for layout, while the correct usage is to use them only for tabular data (information to be put in tables).

Benefits of Standards Compliance

Creating quality, standards compliant code has a number of benefits:

• website forward compatibility
• increased site download speed
• browser compatibility
• easier site maintenance
• broader target audience

How Can This Help Business?

Perhaps every entrepreneur is asking himself right now, “And where is the monëy here?” Probably every benefit can either increase revenues or save expenses. Let’s look at them in detail.

Site Forward Compatibility

Web standards, such as XHTML and CSS, are designed to work forever. They will also be supported for an almost unlímited period of time. Designing a site according to web standards will ensure the website backbone will not need to be redone any time soon, which reduces the amount of work on the site and the expenses of the site owner.

Increased Download Speed

When using XHTML for content and structure and CSS for styling and formating, page size is reduced when compared to a page, designed with tables for layout. For instance, a site with a relatively small number of images is 50% smaller than a table-based website. Because users enjoy fast-loading websites (they start leaving after eight (8) seconds beyond clicking on a link), they will be more likely to become a clients of a web standards compliant website.

Browser Compatibility

A web standards compliant site is displayed correctly (and looks the same) in all standards compliant browsers. Adjusting the site to suit a less helpful browser (Internet Explorer, for instance) is much easier with CSS than with tables. This saves enormous amounts of time for a web designer.

Easier Site Maintenance

When separating content and styling with XHTML and CSS, it is much easier to edit any of those, because they are located in different files. Should one need to adjust the look of the main page heading (), he/she will just need to change a line or two in a style sheet to change the appearance of all headings on the website. Editing content is easier as well, because no styling and formatting is in the way and it is easy to spot the content in clean and semantically correct code markup.

Broader Target Audience

Furthermore, web standards are used not only on computers, but also by PDAs (hand held devices, palm computers), phones and other devices. A site, adhering to web standards, will be displayed correctly either without editing or will require very little work to be displayed correctly on a platform other than a computer. Such easy availability will make the company site easily accessible for a wider range of potential customers, increasing the chances of business success as well.

Every once in a while, you look at your own personal website and ask yourself, how could I change my website? Update it, tweak it up, trick it out? Sure, you’ve got compliant CSS, a complement of Flash movies, streaming soundtrack, hand-crafted HTML, and lots of Jeff Buckley content (okay, let’s say you run a tribute site). Unfortunately, like cars, websites just get boring to look at after a while, and then it’s time for a makeover.

You may have other reasons to change your website. Big companies with heavily-visited websites regularly change their websites (sometimes once a year) for the purpose of improving its search rankings and SEO. Whatever the reason is, here are some tips that could be useful when giving your little corner of the WWW a facelift.

1.       Try to keep the old URLs of all your pages. Don’t forget that search engines aren’t the only visitors of your site. Other people may have bookmarked your site in their browsers. Other websites may have links to your site’s pages (very important for SEO!), or articles in weblogs and other web journals may have your URLs. If you change URLs from right under these other places, chances are people would come up with a 404 error (“Page Not Found”) when typing in your old URLs. A good rule of thumb would be keep the old URLs, even if you totally revamp your pages. Changing the directory structure might also be problematic, so it might be best to stick to your old directory structure. Alternatively, if you’re forced to rename URLs, you can use HTTP 301 redirects that direct traffic from your old URL to your new one.

2.       Create a new site map for your site. Your new site may throw off visitors for a while at the start. This is really standard practice, but if you haven’t created a site map already, it would be a good idea to create one along with your new site. The site map would make it easier for visitors and search engines to find pages and information on your site. An XML site map won’t hurt either.

3.      Take note of your current site’s rankings. Remember that even the most minor of changes to the page title, or making extensive changes to the body text or content, or, even worse, failing to implement HTTP 301 redirects for renamed pages, will change the rankings of your site’s pages for the worse. If possible, avoid making large-scale modifications and try to keep the page titles as they are.

4.       It won’t hurt to have your newly updated website evaluated by SEO people.

When the time comes to give your website a fresh, new look, keeping these tips in mind would help to ensure your site retains its visitors and ranking.