Creating web sites with compliant code that validates against all the rules and standards set down by the W3C can be difficult to justify. Some developers are standards gurus and some couldn´t care less about the standards or the perceived benefits. So what are the benefits and how are these of value on a website.

Picture the scene if you will, I´m talking with the MD of a start up company over a friendly game of pool in a bar in the centre of town. As happens in this kind of situations we put the world to rights over many important topics. By the fourth pint the conversation starts to turn to web development and how he was having a company build him a website. We talked a bit more before delving on to the dirty topics of his website, standards validation, and accessibility.

Being a company owner my new found pool shark friend was understandably concerned about what people had been telling him about web standards and how they are so important, but upon asking them why the only excuse they could muster was ‘it´s for accessibility, it´ll make it easier for disabled people to access your site’. Now Mr MD then said he didn´t feel that was so important, and the fact they wanted an extra £2K to ensure that the site and all its output was standards compliant was out of the question.

Now being a bit a standards evangelist I was disappointed, but not at Mr MD who had just beat me at pool for the third frame in a row, but at his web company for not doing their job!

Any developer working with clients understands that promoting and selling valid code can be a tough sell, some of the massive ‘balance sheet’ benefits that were a big selling point 3 years ago are fading as the technology improves. I used to rave about the saving of a company´s hosting costs as less space would be needed to store the site, by the HTML pages being smaller, their bandwidth usage gets less hence monthly hosting costs will be less, and the pages are delivered to the end user faster. Although these points are still true, competition between hosts has reduced costs and increased bandwidth and hosting space and Broadband is reaching a good saturation rate.

In my opinion, the real benefits of web based standards in this modern era are based around the principle of the semantic web, future proofing, and reducing build time.

The semantic web is based around the idea that the web page content is the king, and that this should be available to anything anywhere. There are many devices and services that can now read web pages and extract the content from the pages to be reused elsewhere. By correctly formatting HTML documents as XHTML allows this content to be easily read by a computer program and the correct information extracted. This means that content can be updated in one location and then be reused and instantly updated in many different areas or many different devices. This is no truer than with the emerging mobile web which was discussed in a previous post ‘The Future is in the palm of your hand’. By adhering to standards formatting content is easy, and reduces issues arising from mobile content delivery and makes content adaption for mobile a great deal easier.

When correctly formatting a document the document becomes future proof from the browser perspective as the standards laid down by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium who leads the development of the web by creating working groups) are used by software companies to define how web browsers read and display your web page. By adhering to standards your page will be consistently displayed (or with minor amends to style sheets) from now on. This technique also allows your website to evolve, and makes regular aesthetical changes to the websites design cost effective as the work involved is reduced.

By using web standards, the build time of the web pages themselves is increased as more time will need to be spent in ensuring standards compliant code. But the build time of the CSS style sheets that are used to style and layout the page content is reduced as the results become predictable across modern browsers and differing platforms which brings a reduction in debugging time. The learning curve for web standards can be steep, but the results pay off very quickly.

The benefits of web standards can be difficult to justify on a balance sheet. On top of the associated accessibility benefits, an investment in web standards is an investment in the future, and allows much greater flexibility and agility for the changing markets and requirements that you need from your website. If your web design/development company doesn´t do web standards, why not, is it lazy programming, or are they destined to deliver a website that will need completely redone in the very near future? We don´t work that way. We pride ourselves on a responsible, future proof approach to delivering commercial sites for our clients. It´s best for the client and it´s best for us!

We live in a time when there is so much information we are all experts in something.
We can find out as much as our brains can cope with as quickly as we please. Not only is there lots of information out there but also lots of people are talking about the same information… at the same time… in the same space.

Sometimes it makes me want to close my ears and walk away.

Check out this video by Charles Leadbeater who raises many questions about what all this chatter mean to people, communities, organisations and the Internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo

And the comments afterwards about what people think – adding just the little bit more to the chatter!

I was at a party last weekend and got chatting to some bloke who asked what I do for a living. I said advertising. Straight away he asked if I’d done the new VW ad with the singing dog. Why do people automatically assume that because you’re in advertising you MUST have done the best ad on TV? I confess I’ve said yes before simply because people seem so disappointed when you say no.

So I said yes, and that the dog was called Biscuit and it was shot in San Pedro, Los Angeles over 3 days. I didn’t really.

Instead I told him the truth. I don’t do as many TV commercials as once before simply because clients don’t have the budgets they used to.

He couldn’t agree more. In fact he said he was looking for an agency that could be more creative with his budget. Bingo. My honesty had paid off. I went on to tell him that the place I’d just joined as ‘Creative director’ – come on, I still wanted to impress him somehow - can now offer clients creative ideas across a whole range of media, like brochures and packaging, internal comms and web development, milk cartons and door drops, posters and yes, TV commercials. Ideas can go on anything I said.

He gave me his business card. We’re following up the lead.

Talking of leads, should you want a TV blockbuster featuring a dog, we have one in the office called Harvey.