If you are a web developer or designer new to the concept of web standards and hesitant to take the time to learn them, here are some great reasons for you to learn them. For web professionals who already use web standards, this list may come in handy when you need a good argument, and feel free to add any benefits you think of.
1. Make yourself look more professional
Other web developers and potential employers will be able to look at your work and know that you are someone who likes to keep up with changes in technology and ensure that your knowledge and skills are always up to date. It will make you like a real web professional.
2. Make your customers look good
Use best practices combined with web standards and accessibility to give your customers the opportunity to talk about how they meet everyone and how they find it important that everyone can use their services or learn about their products . You also avoid the negative impact of excluding visitors such as people with disabilities, Mac users, and mobile phone users.
3. Maximize the number of potential customers
You don’t know what device your visitors will use to access your website. You might think you know, but until you're building an intranet for a company that mandates the use of a certain browser.
The only thing you can be fairly sure of is that they're using something that can parse HTML. By using web standards you can be fairly certain that you are making your website work on as many browsing devices as possible.
You don’t know what device your visitors will use to access your website. You might think you know, but until you're building an intranet for a company that mandates the use of a certain browser. The only thing you can be fairly sure of is that they're using something that can parse HTML. By using web standards you can be fairly certain that you are making your website work on as many browsing devices as possible.
4. Faster loading and reduced bandwidth usage
Well-structured markup separates structure and content from presentation and is generally more compact than markup that uses tables and spaced images. Files are smaller and allow users to download faster. Regardless, there are still a lot of people connected to the Internet via dial-up.
If your website hosting plan is limited in free bandwidth usage, smaller files will lower the cost - the traffic provided will not increase.
5. Provide a foundation for accessibility
Using web standards doesn't guarantee that all aspects of your site will be accessible to people with disabilities, but it's a good start. Make sure your documentation is valid, well-structured and semantic, and you're on the way to having an accessible website.
6. Improve search engine rankings
By providing clean, well-structured, and semantically markup well-written content is delicious food for search engine spiders and will help you rank higher. Of course, this will increase traffic, which is what most website owners want.
7. Make your markup easy to maintain
When you need to update your website, would you rather wade through many kilobytes of tables and nested spaced images or just use a clean, well-structured browse file?
It's easier and more efficient to delete, insert or modify non-presentable content than to have to ensure that all your untidy parts render correctly. Using CSS to control layout makes design changes throughout the website easy.
8. Future-proof content
It is currently impossible for anyone to guarantee with 100% certainty that the documents created and stored in electronic form today will still be readable a hundred years from now. Even fifty years. But if you separate content from presentation, and use current web standards, do the best you can to ensure that your content remains readable even when you're away.
9. Good business sense
Why do some business owners say there are no more visitors? A faster website? Improved search engine rankings? Potentially good publicity? There is no reason to do this.
10. This is the best way to do things
The web standards approach is the way we should build our website from the beginning. Now why don't we do something the right way and have a really great reason to feel good about ourselves.