Beegamax Creative Art Plus – Web Design, Online Marketing, SEO and Social Media Communication

Written on September 25, 2007 – 10:15 am

More and more web designers are using web standards in building websites. What is the purpose and benefits on it actually? Let’s continue reading the article below.

By using web standards, your website is designed upon technologies that have been tested bu leading experts in web community and organizations. For instance, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has ensures that this standard is compatible with browsers in several products. Orienting your designs toward standards means ensuring it compatible with the latest innovations.

The web technologies that are here including:

HTML – a technologies has been growth and success for 12 years through its careful developments and innovations.

XHTML – Extensible HyperText Markup Language is the successor of HTML. Primary used now because web contents now need to be delivered in many different devices.

CSS – Used widely in websites and web applications. It is used to define web layout in HTML. The main purpose is to simplify web maintenance and changes to be applied once in CSS documents.

XML – it is used almost everywhere right now because of its flexibilities, This 4 years old technologies is used in web applications and flash applications.

HTTP – network protocol that finds new usage so often, it was first used to surf the web, recently it is used as a messaging protocol through SOAP.

The significant approach in web standards now is creating tableless XHTML websites with CSS support. Actually, It’s not really a sin to use table in HTML anyway. I did use it for hundreds of previous websites created before and I can tell you that I’m really good in laying tables and using spacer GIF to create the right layout. I don’t even need to check the layout once in a while in various browsers, I did check them when all the pages are finished and they always came out right.

But of course there are reasons why I switch to tableless CSS based design.

A website that designed based on web standards generally will have:

• Smaller document size
• Faster loading time
• More accessible to the disable
• More accessible to various devices: PDA, smartphone, etc.
• Easier to maintain
• Higher browsers compatibility
• More search engine friendly
• Future-proof

In order to achieve this, you need the following requirements:

• Use valid XHTML code
  • Valid XHTML is the first step in getting your website accessible in various browsers. Use W3C XHTML Validator to check your code.
• Use valid CSS
  • Keep all the pages featured in weel-defined CSS format. Use CSS Validator to check it.
• Use HTTP Properly
  • Make sure the links in your site are accessible with stable URL, ensuring that http properties are set correctly. Use W3C Link Checker to track them down.
• Use PNG for image format
  • PNG has better compression, more options and it’s free. But this format is not supported by all browsers anyway, IE is the one that always has problems with incompatibility issue.
• Make your contents accessible
  • The benefits is your site can be viewed by wider audiences. This requirement is required by law in some countries. It is not really applied in Indonesia though. Here is the Evaluation tools to check the accessibilities of your site.

In short description, a site build to web standards should be small in size, clean, CSS-based, usable and search engine friendly. With all these advantages, designing and building with these standards could benefits you, your clients and your clients’ customers.

Related posts:

1. Designing To The Web Standards
2. Web Based Image Editor
3. Web Development Prediction for 2007