Websites should be more like toilet seats: Or, why “web standards” are vital to the health of your website

We are “web standards” proponents and practitioners at IX Publishing. Read on to understand why they are crucial to the success of your website in 2009.

On the toilet in my bathroom, there is a sticker which reads: “This fixture complies with ASME/ANSI A119.12.2M.” I am thankful for this sticker, because it meant that when we renovated our bathroom recently, my wife and I could pick out exactly the kind of toilet seat we wanted without having to worry about whether or not it would fit the toilet correctly.

This is a crude example, perhaps. But it points out the importance of “standard specifications” in creating the highest quality end product.

What if you couldn’t mix and match toilets and toilet seats? What if the toilet seat turned out to be three inches longer than the toilet bowl when you screwed it on? It would be a disaster. You get the idea.

Standard specifications are important in most of the things we take for granted, and they are no less important in the world of websites.

For schools and colleges, there are accrediting agencies. For light-bulbs, toilets, and keyboards, there’s ANSI. For the web, there’s the W3C — the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C specifies standard ways to code websites, just as ACICS defines standards for schools and ANSI specifies the standard characteristics of your keyboard.

In the early days of the web, there were almost as many ways to code websites as there were web browsers.  Some made their web sites to work best in Internet Explorer. Others made their sites for Netscape Navigator. Soon it became necessary for popular sites to provide different versions of their websites optimized for different web browsers.

Today, software companies build their web browsers to conform to the web standards defined by W3C. The latest web browsers will still do their best to display non-standard code written using the “old methods,” but your safest bet is to make sure that the code of your website conforms to web standards.

Websites should be more like toilet seats.

Still not convinced? Here are the top three reasons to make sure the code of your web site was written using web standards:

1. Your site has the best chance of displaying properly in different web browsers:  Microsoft Internet Explorer (note: IE-5, IE-6, IE-7, or IE-8 all display web pages differently), Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and the growing array of mobile computing devices such as iPhones and Blackberries.
2. Web pages written using web standards usually load and display more quickly.
3. Major search engine sites such as Google interpret sites using web standards. Generally speaking, the better your website conforms to web standards, the more visible it is to search engines. (Of course, there is more to “getting found” on the web than having good website code, but that’s a topic for another day…)

Contact us today to learn more about how IX Publishing can help you make the most of your website in 2009 by bringing it into greater compliance with web standards.