Web Standards Part 2: The Business Benefits of Designing with Web Standards
After reading Web Standards Part 1 : What are Web Standards?, You now know what these technologies are and why they have been put in place. But the bottom line is how are these technologies going to benefit your business?
Return on investment (ROI)
Using web standards to build website, designers can:
- Redesign in hours instead of days or weeks thereby reducing design costs and hours of repetitive work.
- Improve Search engine rankings. Web pages will be little more than semantically rich headings and paragraphs. There will be no messy mark-up for Search engine spiders to crawl through.
- Support multiple browsers, PDAs, web-enabled cell phones, Braille readers and screen readers without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions.
- Sites built with Web standards satisfy many of the accessibility checkpoints highlighted by the WAI by default.
- Deliver cleaner printed versions of any web page without creating separate "printer friendly" pages or relying on expensive software.
- Move on from HTML, the language of the web’s past, to the more powerful XML based mark-up for the future.
- Future-proof your website and ensure that sites designed with web standards will continue to work in browsers and devices for years to come.
The most obvious and immediate benefit is reduced page size. Load times can be decreased by 25 to 50% as ages become little more than a collection of semantically rich headings and paragraphs with a powerful CSS file controlling all aspects of design and layout. This not only makes pages super fast but makes a far better user experience. World renowned usability expert, Jakob Nielsen (useit.com), notes that users will often close a web page when it takes more than 10 seconds to load so keeping these load times to a minimum is vital.
Gary is the senior developer and accessibility consultant on the Creative Eye team and has over 5 years experience in his field.
Gary Moyle also runs the Web Design Goldmine a website dedicated to providing quality articles, tutorials and templates for design, css, asp.net, php, accessibility, web standards and internet marketing.
