Our Strategy: Web Standards

At the heart of our efficient design strategy are a set of standards and guidelines for designing websites. Web Design has grown up in a highly competitive business world and several factors have led to wide-spread rejection of these standards and the adoption of bad practices.

Building websites using Web Standards encourages good design practices that ultimately save time and money, increasing the potential for return on investment. There are numerous advantages to a standards–based strategy, providing website owners with a valuable edge over competing websites and giving their visitors a positive experience.

Accessible & Search Engine Optimised

Web Standards incorporate guidelines for making websites more accessible to people and devices, increasing reach and market potential. A well–built and accessible website is more friendly to search engines, earning it better search engine placement and increased visibility.

Businesses are realising that an accessible website is an important aspect of their Corporate Social Responsibility, finding the benefits to be very rewarding. Furthermore, a growing number of countries are making it a legal requirement to reach some level of accessibility. In the UK, many websites fall under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), Part III, Section 19, which describes discrimination in relation to the provision of goods, facilities and services.

For more information about the benefits of accessibility in website design, please read our article, The Growing Importance of Accessible Websites.

Simple & Flexible

Basing our approach to website construction on standards simplifies our processes, decreasing the time it takes to develop a website. It also helps us to build extremely flexible and modular websites. For example, using standards allows durable, one-for-all design, meaning no need for printer-friendly versions of pages, separate accessible sites or special sites for handheld devices such as PDAs or mobile phones.

Fast & Cost-effective

Standards-based websites are more efficient than websites built using traditional methods. The modular nature of a standards-based website allows it to be maintained quickly and easily. For example, presentational information is separated from the actual content of the website, meaning that pages can be created or edited without impacting on presentation, thus brand consistency can easily be preserved. Sites can also be validated against standards in order to quickly identify and fix problems.

Additionally, standards-based websites have smaller file sizes (less than half the size of a typical website), resulting in considerable improvements in speed. Smaller files require less storage space and bandwidth, saving money on hosting costs.