“The World Wide Web Consortium , along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call ‘web standards’, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.” - Web Standards Group

Why your business benefits from web standards

Designing with web standards in mind improves the experience for not only disabled users but for everyone. Ever visited a website that only works in one type of browser? Designing with web standards ensures your content is available to a variety of hardware platforms like PC, Mac, Linux and that your content is viewable on all browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and even text only browsers such as Lynx.

Increased performance equals lower business costs

Standards based design means that your pages are leaner and as such load faster. Strip away the old font tags, tables and spacer images and your bandwidth will go down approximately 30%. A website built with web standards is more efficient and uses less bandwidth. Since most Hosting providers bill for traffic over a set limit this can translate into considerable savings.

Higher search engine rankings

Not only will a user struggle to navigate an unusable and invalid site, so will a search engine. If your pages can be viewed easily then a search engine will reward you with better listings.

Future Proof

XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language) can be rendered in any browser including mobile phones and PDA’s.