Since I started working in web design, I have been involved in groups designing with web standards for a long time. I feel more and more that designing according to the standards recommended by W3C is the right thing to do. When I was ready to redesign the adaptivepath.com site, my partner agreed to build it using a standards-compliant approach. But before we get started, we also have some discussion: Adopting web standards requires a lot of effort. Is it worth it?
Sure, a redesign can build credibility among "web standards proponents," but aside from industry accolades, do standards really matter to individual business sites like ours? Can web standards pay off for us? Are there any financial benefits to switching to XHTML+CSS? All answers are: yes.
Accelerate development
Although the simplicity of HTML pages has greatly promoted the development of the web, it has also become a bane. Because they are so "tolerant" to code formats, they have encouraged the development of some browser private codes, which have prevented countless users from getting the best experience (seeing the best effects of the page).
Many of our clients build multiple versions of their site to provide the best possible design for as many users as possible. For our company, we only need a set of HTML pages, a style sheet and a very small amount of development. More than 95% of users of the adaptivepath.com website use standards-c ompliant browsers. So we thought, it's time to transition to web standards.
Web standards force you to perform error checking. Simply declare what version of your HTML is, and the validator will verify your page according to the standards you declared. The validator will strictly verify and tell you in detail what errors there are, which shortens the time developers spend on quality and ensures that your site maintains a high degree of consistency across different browsers. Even though today's browsers still have some display bugs, it's much better than what it was five years ago.
Easy to maintain, increased opportunities
For many years, web standards groups have recommended the virtues of "keeping visual design and content separate", which means that HTML has become very simple (almost ridiculous), with most XHTML pages having only a few semantically rich <div> and <p > tag, and a link to a powerful CSS file. This complete separation makes the development and maintenance of your pages easier, first of all because it enables better coordination between development teams, such as editors and designers can work separately.
Recently, there was a project where we used CSS technology and we developed CSS files for customers on our own development server. While they are preparing content on the back-end server, we can also constantly modify the design. We only need to simply edit the CSS file without having to integrate with their version release system. The work is carried out in parallel, and we have shortened the time dramatically. development time. Rapid development gains competitive and cost advantages. Shorter development time not only saves costs, but also frees up resources, thereby gaining more opportunities.
Expand access channels
Clean code brings more benefits. Browsers that do not support CSS can now simply ignore the style sheet. In other words, the semantic XHTML representation can be rendered by any browser, including non-traditional clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, voice readers, screen readers, etc. etc. Any device that supports these simple tags will do.
A site that complies with web standards can support mobile access; support Section 508 usability standards; and be compatible with older browser versions. You get all the benefits and it's easier to develop and maintain, and you even save some hardware costs in the process.
Save bandwidth costs
When we stripped the font, table tags, and some images used for decoration from the page, we reduced the page size from 20.9k to 9.2k. At the moment, these reductions may seem trivial, but when aggregated across all page visits they amount to a significant amount that overwhelms our site with traffic.
Our site receives approximately several thousand page views a day, which can save 56% of bandwidth. While large commercial sites may reach such visits in one or two minutes, popular popular sites often reach tens of millions of page views in a day. If you save 30-40k per page, and the cached style sheet does not need to be downloaded again, you can save these sites thousands of dollars every month. You will see those IT people excited about this design!
Improve user experience
While the money is easy to quantify, compressing code also brings more hidden, additional benefits. It's no secret that a fast, active site always results in a better, overall user experience.
In the early days of the web, the design of huge graphical interfaces made dial-up Internet users endure slow access speeds. With the popularity of broadband, this situation has improved. But business travelers on business trips may still become your new users by dialing up from their hotel phone. Using clean, standardized code can help your users accomplish their goals on the website quickly and easily.
The transformation proved worthwhile
We decided to switch to standards, not as a courtesy, but because of the lovely financial benefits that standards bring. That's why more and more cool sites are turning to web standards. Why haven't you started transitioning to XHTML+CSS yet?
The economic benefits brought by standardization are tangible. Once our sites are standardized, businesses will realize the true promise of free sharing of content.