If you’re a web developer or designer new to the concept of web standards and are undecided on whether you should spend the time to learn all about them or not, here are some of the most important reasons for doing so.

This is also a useful list reason for when you need to validate why you work to web standards even if other don’t.

1. You look more professional

Other web professionals, prospective employers and clients  can look at your work and know that you are a person who likes to keep up with changes in technology and make sure that your knowledge and skills are always current. It will make you look like a real web professional.

2.You’ll make your clients look good

Use web standards combined with best practices for accessibility and give your clients a chance to talk about how they cater to all people, and how they find it important that everybody can use their services or find information about their products. You will also avoid the bad publicity that can be caused by shutting out visitors like disabled people, Mac users, and mobile phone users. Remember when a user has a good experience on your web site they tell one person if they have a bad experience they’ll tell 10!!!

3. your maximising the number of potential visitors

You don’t know which device visitors will use to access your site. You may think you know, but unless you’re building an Intranet for a company that controls what browsers are installed on all machines then you really have no idea what device or technologies your users are using so by adhering to standards you have more chance of ensuring that your web pages look as you expect.

By using web standards properly you make sure that you have done your part in making your site work with the largest possible number of browsing devices.

4. Faster loading and reduced bandwidth usage

Well-structured markup that separates structure and content from presentation is generally much more compact than table-and-spacer-image-based tag soup. Documents will be smaller and faster for visitors to download. Like it or not, there are still many, many people connecting to the Internet through dialup.

5. Provide the foundation for accessibility

Using web standards does not guarantee that all aspects of your site will be accessible to people with disabilities, but it is a very good start. Make sure your documents are valid, well-structured, and semantic, and you’re well on the way towards having an accessible site.

6. Improve search engine rankings

Well-written content delivered through clean, well-structured, and semantic markup is delicious food for search engine spiders and will help your rankings. This, of course, will lead to increased traffic, which is what most website owners want.

7. Make your markup easier to maintain

Would you rather wade through many kilobytes of multiply nested tables and spacer images or just browse through a clean and well-structured document when you need to update your site?

Removing, inserting or editing presentation-free content is much easier and more efficient than having to make sure you get all the presentational cruft right. Using CSS to control layout also makes it much easier to make site-wide design changes.

8. Future-proof content

There is no way anyone can guarantee with 100% certainty that the documents created and stored electronically today will be readable in a hundred years. Or even fifty years. But if you separate content from presentation and use current web standards, you have done the best you can to ensure that your content can still be read even after you’re gone.

9. Good business sense

Why would any business owner say no to more visitors? A faster site? Improved search engine rankings? Potential good publicity? It doesn’t make sense to do so.

10. It’s the right way to do things

The web standards way is the way we should have built the web from the beginning. And now that we can, why not do something the right way and have a really excellent reason to feel good about yourself.

Because instead of being “everything to everyone” your website will more likely end up being “nothing to anyone”. You may be saying to your self www.yourfavoritewebsite.com (a fictitious web address that you can replace with your personal favourite) has a target audience of everyone and is satisfying the needs of everyone very nicely thank you!! But if you look carefully at these sites you’ll find they actually have websites within websites with each catering to individual target audience groups.

Identifying your target audience is a fundamental aspect of website planning and analysis. Once you have identified your target audience you should be able to identify what they want from your website and then be able to plan a website that fulfill their needs.

When you do your audience analysis you should define at least 3 audience definitions that are clear and precisely.

Defining your target audience will allow you to focus on your most important customers requirements.

Note the qualities that define your target audience:

• What is their age, gender, location, income, job etc?
• What is your current relationship with them?
• Are they experienced with the Internet?
• What are their online spending habits?
• What are their needs?
• Is the buyer the user?
• Why they are coming to your site?
• What are they hoping to find?
• How often are they online?
• What do they generally use the web for?
• What is the primary “action” they should take when coming to your site (i.e. purchase, search for information)?
• What are the key reasons why they will choose your company’s products / services (i.e. cost, service, value)?
• Are they existing or prospective customers.
• How they will be accessing your website eg computer or phone.
• Which browser
• Family situation
• Household situation

• Mozilla.com
• Iconbuffet.com
• Boldchat.com
• Enhancedlabs.com
• Protolize.org
• Sumagency.com
• www.teamviget.com

Mozilla.com

Clear, open, fresh, simple. When you arrive at this site, you’re under no doubt what the site does, or where to start looking for what you want. The design is positive and happy.

Iconbuffet.com

The site sells icons, so it lets the icons rule, showing its wares from the first page.

The colours and typography are solid & strong, projecting a trustworthy brand while not getting in the way of the proposition.

Boldchat.com

Boldchat provide a great live chat service for web sites, which is a very wide market to address.

So the site design is clean, smart, and shiny, using clean copy and smart imagery to communicate the core messages in a compact space.

EnhancedLabs.com

Another icon maker, doing bigger, richer icons, so the the site showcases them bigger & richer.

Bold, flattish colour creates a strong first impression and still lets the product stand out.

Protolize.org

Tony Yoo’s collection of recommended web resources is a great example of strong graphic elements balancing to make a site that’s bold and easy to use.

Big text, simple nav, high usability, all wrapped in strong colour and finished off with nice graphical touches.

Sumagency.com

Acres of balanced white space, easy-read text and cute content graphics combining to tell a simple story.

• www.teamviget.com

I just love the concept with the wall metahpor that this website uses. I also think that the way this site works with all the interaction and movement being done with CSS is very cleaver.

What Do you think?
When you go to a website that you like do you know why you like it?
Do you even think about why you like it