W3C Compliance
Building compliant websites
To the average internet user, there is nothing that is less sexy than HTML code. And that's okay. But beautiful code is important for many reasons - and because our code is worthy of a permanent exhibit in a modern design museum, users of our sites are having a much better online experience.
Why W3C compliancy is important
You will have noticed that most pages on the internet are quite dramatically different. Nonetheless, most websites are surprisingly similar 'under the hood' - and there's a reason for that. They all use the same building blocks: Hypertext Markup Language - or HTML among friends. It's a flexible language which is capable of doing a lot of different things, but there's an agreed way of using it: a set of standards set by the W3C.
Why be standards compliant? Well, for one thing, using standard markup and style sheets gives a much greater chance of having a web page that is displayed consistently across platforms and user agents now and in the future.
If you're concerned about SEO, then it's really important that your pages validate because errors in the code can disrupt the important process of a spider parsing your page for all relevant content or make some of that content invisible.
The website will load faster, too, because a well-built, standards-compliant page has less code overall.
Great for accessibility
A fully compliant web page can be more easily parsed not just by standard web-browsers but also search engine spiders. A well-coded site is accessible to a much wider range of users, including blind users, vision impaired users, dyslexic users, visitors with motor skill impairments, etc. It can be parsed by screen readers which read content out loud to the users, it generally looks better when a user decides to print the page.
With us, W3C compliancy isn't optional - we think it's important and the right thing to do. It's our way of making the Internet a better place for everyone.
Test your website!
If you're curious how well your current website fares, why not test it for free using http://validator.w3.org/?
