Why do I need my website built properly?
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An interesting question and one that should be explained before we continue.
By properly I refer to the use of 'Web standards' which are a set of guidelines and proposals that web developers (like me!) should follow.
Historically web sites have been built using older methods of HTML (the language that we use to markup your web content) and by doing so it becomes a nightmare to update, maintain and for search engines to find.
I'm going to jump straight in and list some reasons why having your website built properly and adhering to standards can and will help your business.
Easy to maintain and update the design
A website is very organic and rarely stays the same for long. Your business may change or possibly the industry will and you need to change to reflect it. Adding new sections to your website or re-designing pages becomes simple when we use web standards. This in turn saves time and cost from having a web developer pick through your code.
Just see how easy it is to change the colours and letter casing on my site!
Improved User Experience: Less Bandwidth and Fast Loads
When using HTML (the language which describes your content) in conjunction with CSS (the language which presents it) a typical page is heavily reduced in page weight due to less amounts of code. Studies have shown that it reduces the size by 25% - 50% on average which helps users as most of them will close a web page if they wait more than 8 seconds.
The style sheet only needs to load once and then it is cached. The payload might be slightly higher for the first page. But for accessing multiple pages of a site over many visits the savings in bandwidth are huge.
Be nice to search engines
In the bad old days of web design our content was drowned underneath reams of code and the poor search engines had mountains to dig through. These days using semantic HTML (this means using it to describe your content) we can assist search engines by allowing them easy access to your crucial information.
Easier to print
Remember when everyone had those 'Click here for print friendly version' links scattered about? No need for those anymore! Using CSS we can decide how your content will look on paper and as soon the user hits print it is taken care of. A great asset to text heavy pages.
Accessibility
The web has many types of user and some of them may have visual impairments or may be completely blind. Adopting web standards allows us to easily make a site viewable for someone using a screen reader and also stop the site from breaking if a visually impaired user adjusts the text size.
Future Proofing
Overall, you'll make your site ready for the future of the web allowing you to plug in new features, update the design easier and newer future browsers will have no trouble accessing your content (this includes hand-held PDAs, mobile phones etc)
In the modern web, content is king and adopting proper semantic web standards will allow you to convey that content whilst still keeping it stylish.
Further reading
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_Business_Benefits_of_Web_Standards
- http://icant.co.uk/webstandardsforbusiness/pmwiki.php/Main/MACCAWS-Whitepaper-Benefits
- http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/checklist.htm#section1-6 (A check list that my sites conform to)
- http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/benefits/index10.htm
