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Why web standards are important in web design
Posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 under CSS, XHTML, web design news, web standards by Dustin Brewer.There is a lot of talk amongst designers about why web standards are important, sometimes it is a bragging point to say that you know a lot about CSS and HTML and can make a good site within standards. Some of it is just a line to make whatever you are doing sound better. I hear a lot of local Oklahoma web design companies talk about web standards but for the most part I see some of them still designing in tables or not even getting the bare minimums in when it comes to web standards.
This article is going to be directed at web design firms, web design clients and web designers everywhere. The importance of web standards is more then just something to say, it is the way the web should be designed. There is more then just passing an HTML or CSS validator when it comes to standards. Even so there is more to making a site pass coding standards, accessibility being the primary objective. Accessibility is usability, it isn’t just about disabled it is about ensuring that your site will work from the time it is published until the end of time if it needs to. I’ll go over different web standards and accessibility guidelines and how they can be implemented, used and maintained better then just exporting a document out of Adobe Photoshop or throwing together an insane unaccessible image map.
Web standards are important for maintainability
When it comes to making something work, you don’t want to use duct tape where nails should be used or glue where something needs to be welded. Using the right tools for the job is part of any project, whether it be on the web or in your backyard. The solution to most problems when it comes to web is to ensure that you are adhering to web standards as best you can within any given project. This ensures for longevity of the projects life with little or no structure maintenance.
When you use web standards the way they are meant to be, like safety guidelines, you are separating out presentation and structure so when it is time for a redesign you are making it as easy as possible to simply replace a stylesheet or two rather then recode an entire site. This ability may not be necessary for all sites but when you are dealing with a large project it is very difficult to go back in and change all of the HTML within the site.
Web standards are important for usability
Using web standards in your design will ensure that you are appealing to the majority of people that may visit your site. You don’t just want to make your site accessible to just one browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, you need to make sure that it works across as many browsers as possible. It is sometimes difficult to get it working perfectly across all browsers but you really have to make sure you are paying attention to browser usage numbers. Right now most people should be checking Firefox, Opera, IE7, IE6 (there are ways to test multiple versions of IE) and Safari. These are the most popular browsers being used, I personally don’t go beyond that set of browsers for most projects.
The amount of people actually using some of the older browsers are so few that at some point you would be sacrificing design to make up for the 1 or 2 people a month you may see using these browsers. When you make your site in web standards, web compliant, you should be able to mostly get the web site to look the same across all of these browsers. When it comes to Internet Explorer though, you have to make exceptions some of the time. There are ways to target Internet Explorer using an if statement that can help you change some CSS to get your site to work right in different versions of IE.
But as long as you are ensuring that your design is semantic and standards compliant then you should be able to ensure cross browser compatibility in your web projects.
Web standards are important for clients
When you are building a project for a client your business is based on making that client happy. If you aren’t making your client happy then you are destroying your business. That client is going to talk about their experience with you to other potential clients and if your short term or long term relationship had issues they are going to talk about it. In the short term as long as you get their project completed in a timely manner in an aesthetically pleasing manner you are going to make them happy. The long term problems are where you are mostly going to see clients potentially unhappy.
Once your client discovers that their site doesn’t work in a new browser or even an older browser they are going to be upset with you. They are going to think that you never did their site right because it is broken and you didn’t tell them. Ensuring that you test your web design projects on as many browsers as possible and adhere to web standards is the best way to ensure long term happiness with your client’s web sites.
You will be especially happy when it comes time to redesign or modify their site and you used standards. The better effort that was put into the site will make your future work with that clients web site all the more easier. If you just slapped it together any slight change is going to be a headache and more work then necessary. A lot of the benefits of using web standards on clients sites is ensuring that you have to do less work to make new things work on client sites.
Web standards are more then passing a validator
Most people claim they are standards compliant just because they pass a validator. Coding standards are not the only standards that are referred to when it comes to using web standards in design. Accessibility is major part of web standards, the object of accessibility is making web sites usable for as many people as technology will allow.
Making your web site Section 508 or WAI-WCAG compliant is a major part of any commercial project, Target was recently sued because their site wasn’t Section 508 or WAI-WCAG compliant. It isn’t even difficult to make your site Section 508 or WAI-WCAG compliant it all starts with ensuring that your web site is CSS and HTML compliant and then building upon the existing semantics of your sites design to ensure it is accessible. It is easy to get started, simply making alt tags that are relevant to an image are helpful to achieving compliance. The best way, however, is to test your site and see what the validator says. This will start you on the path to achieving accessibility within your web site. Once you have done this, it is time to start testing your site with screen readers and other tools to see if there are improvements that can be made based on your experience with the software. It is an ongoing battle but can open you up to usability improvements to non-disabled users even.
Web standards are about quality design work
It is more then just going to the trouble of making your site standards compliant, it is about doing quality work within your web designs. Most of us are in this field because we enjoy what we do, when you enjoy doing something it is best to do it the right way to push towards advances in the field. Quality is paramount in an industry filled with so-called experts exporting directly from photoshop and publishing.
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21 Responses to “Why web standards are important in web design”
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.
Great article. I was trying to think of reasons to explain clients why web standrds are so iportant and it lookslike you did it for me.
Even I have been advised to follow web standards. But yet I have not found out what exactly are web standards. Do you mean to say CSS 2.0 or HTML 1.1 are termed as web standards or are they used to define the principles of making web designs.
It would be of help if you could point to some resource which would get us standards on the whats and whys of web standards.
With Regards,
Nitin.
The most current recommendations coming from the W3C are CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.0. You can find our more about future technologies that are being recommended by visiting the W3C.
CSS2.1 is above and beyond discussion. However XHTML1.0 is not. Google for”not xhtml” and you’ll find plenty of good cases why not to use it.
Maentime I’ll stick to and will make a case for HTML4.01 strict.
Great. Just one addition. It is absolutely unnecessary for any web page to have the _same_ look across all browsers. It is just recommendable that it has a _similar_ look across the most popular browsers. To say it drastically: A web page having some look in f.ex. IE can and will never have the same look in Jaws. Why? Jaws does not have any grafical or visual output at all, it presents the page not in a viewable, but in a hearable form. So the page would have no look at all here. It is obvious that “no look at all” ist per definition different to “any look whatsoever”. Mandatory is only that a given web page must be usable across all browsers. Or to extend this requirement: It is mandatory that a given web page must be usable as equally good as possible across browsers.
I really like this article. I’m probably going to show it to my web clients when they ask about web standards. Not to techinical and easy to understand.
[...] Why Web Standards Are Important In Web Design from Dustin Brewer. [...]
You might want to include a link to test your pages using different browsers. Browsershots is a free online platform where you can test your Web design using different browsers, visit http://www.Browsershots.org. It’s free.
Do you guys think that HTML will be standardized?
cheers!
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[...] liked how blogger Dustin Brewer broke down why web standards are important in web [...]
good one.
“Making your web site Section 508 or WAI-WCAG compliant is a major part of any commercial project, Target was recently sued because their site wasn’t Section 508 or WAI-WCAG compliant. It isn’t even difficult to make your site Section 508 or WAI-WCAG compliant…”
I didn’t realize how important Section 508 or WAI-WCAG compliant was that you could actually get sued for not following it. I’m going to make sure that I fully understand those standards!
When you mention checking your site with a “validator” what specifically are you talking about? A particular program that verifies your code? or what?
Its great to see a fellow designer taking the time to not only inform clients of the importance of diligence in testing a web site and dedication to making it the best site that it can be; but also linking resources for other designers.
I’m going to add this post to my list of must-have resources. Thank you.
@jlphannah I’m referring to the W3C (X)HTML Standard when I talk about validation. You can check the validation (for markup errors) of your website with http://validator.w3.org/
There are also a ton of Firefox extensions that will automatically do it for you (unobtrusively) from your browser window.
Both will tell you what is wrong with the markup and typically what you can do to fix the issue.
Ensuring that your markup is validated is a major step towards making your websites cross-browser compatible.
I really liked your article. I am also a big fan of web standards and I believe they should be a stepping stone for every web project.
I also think you left out another important business goal that can be improved by making a site standard. This is the findability of the site. It has been known that search engines (which are just another user of your site) get confused if the markup is not proper. So, one of the best insurance you have that your site will be crawled correctly is actually making it web standards compliant.
I make some of these points also in our blog: http://www.aggiorno.com/blog/post/Accessibility-Checklist-and-Web-Standards.aspx
Never have I ever simply replaced a stylesheet for a new design of an entire website. For me this seems like a web myth.
Maybe if all of my sites were fixed width, horizontally centered, 2-3 column cookie cutter web 2.0 sites with little actual variety in content I could pull that off.
Generally I restyle reusable elements like contact forms and the like. Most real websites ( not 5 page vanity sites) require more in depth work than simply resetting stylesheets.
I appreciate removing removing the style from the content, but it is no panacea and actually requires careful organization to avoid becoming a big pain in the but. The many ways a cascade can affect the same tag can be so complex that bad css can be standards compliant but a ridiculous for a different designer to come in and edit. Bad CSS is very very easy to write, good CSS is pretty rare. Most of the “fixit” jobs I come across are full of uncommented disorganized and redundant CSS.
Bottom line is: web standards do not actually make for solid code or design. Too often I have seen people obsessing over it when they should be focused on the KISS principle and meeting deadlines and budget requirements.
[...] Why Web Standards Are Important In Web Design [...]
[...] 12, 2008 at 4:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized I was reading articles about Web Standards , when I came across a guy called Dustin Brewer and his insights about this [...]
[...] article Why web standards are important in web design by Dustin Brewer is absolutely a must read. It explains quite well the fundamental of web [...]
[...] web standards is simply bad business practice for web designers. As Dustin Brewer expresses in his blog, your client may be pleased with your design, but once they learn your design limits their web [...]
Dustin, I found your post very informative. I referenced it as part of a class assignment. I was curious if your client grasp the understandings of Web Standards and if this is a useful marking tactic?