Posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 4:02 pm.
Having just finished doing some W3C Compliance fine tuning on a web site I recently finished, I thought I’d just write a quick blog about the importance of W3C compliance.
In my opinion, making your web site W3C Complaince serves the following benefits:
- Increased cross-platform reliability.
- Increased ‘Crawlability’ by Search Engine Bots.
- Good working practice.
- Once explained, shows your clients that you take the standards into consideration.
- Prevents your potential competition from finding faults in your work.
As a website designer, I personally get a sense of satisfaction when I know that I have coded my site to the recommendation of W3C. But perhaps one of the best reasons to take the time making your site(s) compliant is the impact that it can have on your search engine rankings.
If your web site is written in well formatted, complaint coding, the bots will have a much easier and reassuring time crawling your web-site. Whilst we do not know if Google actually validates web sites as part of it’s ranking algorithm, it wouldn’t hurt to assume that it does.
In my opionion, web sites that are coded to the W3C complaince standards stand to fare better in the rankings than sites that have not taken advantage is this consideration.
Channel
on May 7th, 2009 Says:
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.
on May 21st, 2009 Says:
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
on June 16th, 2009 Says:
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 …:)
on July 9th, 2009 Says:
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!
on July 13th, 2009 Says:
Because W3C compliance is really too hard for understanding.
Much more eathier to create website from begining till end by some of webbuilder like http://www.site2you.com or the rest who works in this way.