Web standards

What do you mean by “web standards”?
Why to care about web standards?
How can you tell that a web site is built according to the web standards?

What do you mean by “web standards”?

Web standards is a general term describing a number of techniques and practices that aim to improve standards of creating web sites.

Why to care about web standards?

A site built according to web standards has many advantages:

It is more accessible.
It downloads faster.
It can be better viewed by alternative devices, such as mobile phones.
It is easier to be found by search engines.
It is easier to print.
It is significantly easier to update or redesign.
It is timeproof (is more likely to stand the test of time).

How can you tell that a web site is built according to web standards?

If you are not very a technical person, it might be a challenge to recognise a web site built according to web standards.

Though, you might have noticed that there is a new trend on the Internet to create web sites in a framed area. If you look at the examples on the pictures 1 - 3 on the bottom of the page, you can see that each of these web sites takes only a part of the screen, instead of the whole. This often can be a sign of a web site built with web standards (but not exclusively, it can be misleading).

The rest of the signs are much more technical and are best asked of a specialist.

The most popular attribute of web standards is CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), and is also the most important one, and one requested by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. A web site built with a Table Based layout (the older way of web site design) is considered neither web standards built, nor accessible.

At Natasha Hill Web Design Studio we create all web sites to conform to web standards and accessibility guidelines.

If you have any questions or comments, please send us an e-mail or go to contact us page and fill in a small form.