So, W3C is the commonly used acronym for The World Wide Web Consortium. They are an international community of organisations and individuals who work together developing the standards that we use to create websites.
Companies like Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe and Mozilla are just a handful of the hundreds of member organisations who contribute to the evolving standards set out by The W3C. The ‘W3C Markup Validation Service’ is a free, public tool that is available online at validator.w3.org – in the video above, we take a look.
The Benefits of making your websites W3C Compliant.
The first benefit is SEO. Standards complaint content is easily crawled and cached by search engine bots. If your pages are made up of substandard mark-up, then you run risk the bots abandoning pages before crawling and caching them correctly.
The second benefit is the increased stability and usability of your web design. Making your pages compliant won’t guarantee they’ll be look and function exactly the same in all browsers, but it will reduce the factors that can contribute.
And finally, and possibly most importantly, is professionalism. The W3C and their mark-up validation tool exist for a reason, to push, evolve and improve the quality of the web.
If, as a designer you embrace and confirm to the standards then you can expect to shorten your development time and create SEO friendly websites in a uniform mark-up that is recognisable to all in the industry. Despite building on our previous blog post, we’re only scratching the surface of W3C compliance and the benefits that come with it.
It would be great to get a dialog going on the subject, so please leave your comments below.
With regards to web design, there is nothing more unprofessional than an inconsistent design. W3C compliance is vital to ensure the design of your website is consistent not only across different pages of the website but also across different platforms and web browsers. A professional web design company or agency will always focus on W3C compliant design. Like with SEO, a business will expect any professional web design firm to build a website that is W3C compliant and bug free.
This is an interesting post that is not often fully understood by clients.
Using schematic markup as well as standards can really boost a sites performance. We have had many clients sites that appear with top rankings straight after registration with Goggle.
I just wish clients understood the hard work put into them
I’m not a web developer, I’m a designer, and hence this is one of the most vital reasons why I pass my clients over to a different firm for their web development.
In can build a website easily enough, but I have neither the skills or interest in gaining the skills and experience required to build websites which are ‘fully’ compliant.
Full compliance means cleaner code and all the benefits that come with that which you have mentioned.
It’s not an easy task and requires knowledge and experience. I think it’s important to built sites to standards, and ensure that I only refer my clients to firms who take this issue seriously in their builds.
It can be difficult however to convince some customers what the difference is between a perhaps more expensive development firm and a cheaper firm … usually it’s a more expensive firms dedication and testing procedures to ensure compliance. Plus one usually has to pay more for higher skills such as this.
I’m waffling anyway …:)
Some good points raised there Amanda, with regards to development companies, I beleive ‘You Get What You Pay For’.
We find that when we explain W3C compliance to our clients, not all of them appreciate the benefit, however once we start talking about improving crawlability for Bots, their ears soon prick up!
This post has now been upgraded with the video blog that has been embedded at the top of the page.