Web Standards, Browsers, And Designing For The Future
If you are new to web designing, or are planning to design a website for your business, it is important that you make yourself aware of web standards. It is necessary for you to know the standards and practices established by the W3C i.e. the World Wide Web Consortium. It is extremely useful in creating as well as interpreting content. It helps ensure that web-based content is accessible to as big an audience as possible using different types of browsers. Popular browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and Safari etc. Web pages have to be designed keeping in mind certain development standards to ensure that web pages appear similar on most of these browsers.
As technological advancements happen at a high rate, newer browser versions are brought out. A page may look good on one browser but may not appear as attractive on other browsers. This is not necessarily a problem with your website but it also means that these browsers are not up to W3C standards.
When you start designing your website you may start with browsers like Firefox, which are strict about complying with standards. When designing you have to use a combination of W3C compliant web page structure of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for looks. This combination makes your website flexible and easy to maintain. CSS makes it easy to design web pages without having to use traditional designs using tables.
There are even tools like Dreamweaver which allow you to create CSS with automatic code generation. In addition, a MarkUp Validation Service allows you to find errors in web pages and even suggest corrections.
As is the case with hand written or printed books which may not be readable after maybe a 100 years, you cannot guarantee that your documents created for the web will be stored and readable after even 50 years. However, if you separate content from presentation using current web standards you may be able to find it even after many years. This is possible by separating content using XHTML markup from presentation using CSS. Following standards help in ensuring consistency regardless of browser.
Benefits of web standards
Using web standards can be beneficial in many ways. You cannot only enhance websites in search engine rankings, you can also find it easier to design them to make them last for a long time. When you use certain standards of web designing for the World Wide Web you will find that it helps enhance your website search engine rankings as quality of your content is good and well structured. Data can also be downloaded faster compared to tables and frames, which suits visitors with slower Internet connections.
As you are abiding by standards, there is a lesser possibility of your site being inaccessible to any type of browser or person with disabilities. Maintaining tables created using separate CSS is easier and simple as compared to those with multiple frames and tables. Moreover, if you have used a CSS over more than one page, any changes to it will be reflected in the pages wherever you have used it. These changes will be universal and uniform over varied pages.
All these considerations and benefits help ensure that your website design is futuristic. Following standards and design with various browsers in mind you may design a website which can be relevant in the future also.
Check out some more of our web marketing tips