There are basically two types of web designers you can hire in order to establish your presence on the internet: those who follow W3C compliance and those who don’t. W3C compliance is a term that refers to a website following the standards prescribed by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C for short. You should specify standards compliance as part of the overall design plan for your website. Why should you deal only with a website design service that is W3C compliant? Here are a few reasons.
A website developed to standards will naturally perform better. This is because there is less HTML markup code to interpret before rendering in a browser. When a website is standards compliant, content is separated from presentation. In the early days of the web, designers used the HTML <table> markup to layout a page. While the pages looked good, internally a browser had to interpret all markup code for page rendering. The W3C standard specifies that all rendering instructions go in custom style sheets (CSS). The standard also recommends using XHTML and the strict option in the DOCTYPE declaration so that there will be little chance of mixing presentation markup with content. Since linked CSS files are cached in a browser, there is no need to transfer rendering code for every page load.
Standards compliance means a better experience for your users. There is nothing more frustrating for a website visitor than to stumble over broken links. Broken links also make it difficult for search engine crawlers to follow every path required for getting your site indexed. The W3C Consortium provides a free link checker that can evaluate and report the condition of your site’s URLs (Uniform Resource Locator).
By complying with standards, you will save on maintenance costs in the long run. More than likely, you’ll have changes that need to be made to your website in the future. There is always a possibility that you will not be able to use the same website design service that you hired before. Consider that a website built on standards can be picked up by any designer and changed much more easily because it won’t have a unique implementation style. It takes way too long (at an additional cost to you) for a designer to try and figure out what his or her predecessor was doing in the code.
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