In Web Design it is important to follow relevant standards. If you design or redesign your website according to Web Standards, it will offer many advantages.

Web standards is a term used to define formal standards and technical specifications that relate to different aspects of web design and the internet. Web design standards are associated with best practices and guidelines for building professional web sites. Adherence to standards is an integral part of a successful web design philosophy.

Professional Web Designers take Web standards into account during the design and development of websites. Standards improve the quality of web design and the effectiveness of the website in general. The quality of a website is often measured by adherence to standards. Web standards focus on a wide range of issues including design quality, accessibility and usability of web sites.

When a web site or web page is described as complying with web standards, it usually means that the site or page has valid or nearly valid HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The HTML should also meet accessibility and semantic guidelines. In other words, a site built to web standards should ideally be lean, clean, CSS-based, accessible, and usable and search engine friendly.

Web standards are published by different organisations. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the leading organisation responsible for publishing standards related to web design. W3C publishes a number of guidelines including W3C recommendations for mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), W3C recommendations for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Document Object Models (DOM).

Web Design Standards – Advantages of using web standards in web design

1) Browser Compatibility:

Different users use different browsers and hardware platforms. A website that is designed with the standards and best practices in mind will work uniform across browsers and platforms. This is important for branding as well as usability of your website.

2) It ensures your website is accessible to a larger audience:

Adherence to standards improves the accessibility of your website. It ensures that older as well newer versions of browsers can understand your documents and display the content of your website. Compliant documents are also easily shared on the internet and can be converted to different formats is required to share. Standards also mean that your website is accessible to users with impairment who use specialist tools as such as voice or Braille browsers.

3) Stability:

Standards also make it easy for web designers or developers to understand code that could have been developed by other teams. This makes it easier to enhance or edit the design or code if required in future. If a website has been designed with standards then another designer can easily understand and edit the code in future.

4) Better compatibility with devices:

Web content is accessed today with a variety of methods. Compatibility has become even more important today as website content is accessed using a range of devices. We access websites on standards desktops, laptops, palmtops, and mobile phones and even on digital TV. A website that complies to standards can be accessed by a variety of platforms and devices. The same site can be accessed by a variety of methods without having to provide multiple delivery channels.

5) Better Quality of code:

W3C web standards promote better quality of programming and design. This leads to the design of professional websites that are free from bugs and errors. The html is efficient and loads faster in browsers. Compliant websites use clean CSS based designs.

6) Better visibility on search engines:

Adherence to standards can improve the search engine rankings of your website. A website designed with web standards offers improved visibility on search engines and other forms of web searches. Proper Use of tags and overall mark-up of web pages makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index independent pages of your website. A low “code to content” ratio improves the chances for ranking higher on search engines.