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Modern Web Design: The Four Essentials

Using Valid Code

Nashville Web Design Resources

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Most manufactured products are designed and assembled to adhere to some sort of standard. Would you buy a home that didn't conform to standard design rules? Would you purchase an automobile that didn't comply with the applicable standards?

The bottom line is this: standards have purpose, and it is unprofessional to ignore them. The validation of a site's web pages with the W3C's HTML validation service should be a standard part of web design quality assurance. In the real world, there will be some examples of pages that won't validate, but that is no reason not to validate them.

Ignored for a long time by many web designers and web developers, web standards are at the very foundation of the success of the web. The current trend of stressing web standards compliance is not due to chance: it is a win-win situation for all involved.

A More Powerful Web Site

By using current web standards, your Web site's foundation is built upon proven, solid technologies developed and tested by leading experts in the Web community. For example, the W3C process ensures that a technology reaching its final development stage has been implemented into several compatible products. With almost 500 companies and organizations from the IT world participating, these standards are truly the leading edge of the Web.

Reduced Maintenance Costs

Things evolve very fast on the Web, and maintaining a large enterprise Web site can imply fairly big operational costs. Without a compliant Web site, migrating to new platforms and adding functionality to your web applications can be expensive operations.

However, if your web projects and applications are developed using open standards, the results won't depend on a unique provider:

Because standards are built to be combined, developing new applications from an existing base is much easier, because the tools used to manipulate open technologies continuously become more sophisticated, more numerous, and more powerful. Moving your Web pages from the older HTML to the new web standard, XHTML, for instance, means that you can easily transform the data to other formats using XSLT or ask for a powerful publishing system with validating mechanisms using XML Schema. And for each of these operations, you can choose from a wide range of software development tools from many different providers.

Finally, standards usually avoid the dreaded feature creep of other formats and clearly separate applications: using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) lets you cleanly separate the presentation from the structure of your content. This very same separation also saves in the operational costs: using CSS means less HTML (now XHTML) code for each page, and therefore bandwidth saving.

Benefit from Accessibility Designs

Making a Web site accessible is both beneficial and challenging.

Keep this in mind: sooner or later, assuming your organization is a going and growing concern, your web site will probably need to be available for more people with increasingly demanding requirements. Adherence to current web standards is the solution.