How Web Standards Benefit You
Since 2006, a number of leading-edge companies have converted their websites to accessible, Standards-based designs. 
Recent high profile conversions include Yahoo, the New York Times, and yes, even Microsoft. These early adopters see the trend, and are getting out ahead of the competition.
For them, the math is simple. Convert to Standards-based design, make your website accessible to more people on more devices, increase traffic to your website, reduce maintenance costs, and make more money. This math works for your company as well. So take a few moments to learn why you should convert to Standards-based Web design today.
Top 10 Benefits of Standards-based Web Design
Here are 10 great reasons to convert your website to Standards-based design today. Click on any category for details:
- Accessibility: One Web for everyone means more traffic for you
- Portability: Put your business in your customer's back pocket
- The search engines' best friend
- Reduced maintenance costs
- Super-fast download times
- Lower bandwidth costs
- Se habla Español: multilingual design means more customers
- Rich new graphics capability
- It's the law (or will be)
- Bulletproof and futureproof your website
1. Accessibility: One Web for Everyone Means More Traffic for You
Converting your website to Web Standards will immediately boost your online traffic by dramatically expanding access to your website. Here's how:
Did you know that 11% of the U.S. population is either sight or hearing impaired? That 54,000,000 Americans have some sort of disability, but one-third nevertheless are working? That 5% of the population can't read ordinary newsprint? Yet all these people have the same desire and right to access the Internet, to buy the products and services that your company offers online.
Traditional website design closes off the Internet to these potential customers, but Web Standards throws open the doors to everyone. And that's good for your business.
When you convert your current website to Standards-based technology, all of these potential user groups will have access to your site. How? First, the online user can easily increase the size of the text on the screen, without breaking the website's structure. (Try it out on our site: in the Internet Explorer toolbar, click View > Text Size, and enlarge the text. Watch how the page seamlessly accomodates changes that would mangle an older site.) Also, for blind users, a screen reader can readily lead them to the important content of your site. For people who lack the manual dexterity to use a mouse (a surprisingly large constituency), your Standards-based site will easily allow them to tab through your site with a special device.
Accessible Web Standards also means awareness of the common pitfalls of poor design layout, such as:
- avoid animations on your site (they're invisible to search engines and many Web access devices, not to mention just plain distracting);
- make all links underlined, not just a different color, so that the 18% of the population that's color-blind can find your site's links;
- avoid multiple side-by-side columns (imagine what that looks like on a narrow cell phone screen!)
2. Portability: Put your business in your customer's back pocket
Many very bright people believe the future growth of the Internet (and thus of your online customer base) is not on the desktop or laptop, but in the hands of users. That's right, now that wireless Internet access is becoming widely available, more and more people are surfing the Internet from their cell phones or PDAs. Unfortunately, the vast majority of websites online today look incomprehensibly mangled on the screen of a handheld device.
But a Standards-based website looks just great. That's because the CSS technology can detect if your online visitor is using a portable device, and then automatically delivers them a version of your site customized for that tiny screen. It's got a smaller logo, narrower text, simplified navigation - everything a handheld user needs to extract useful information from your website. Portable access to your website, 24/7. That's quite a competitive advantage for your business.
3. The Search Engines' Best Friend
The Web Standards movement came about in order to make websites more accessible to users with various disabilities. But a very happy - though unintended - consequence of incorporating Web Standards in your own website is that Google, Yahoo, and other search engines love Web Standards.
Why? Well, a search engine doesn't care at all about your website's color scheme or font type, and can't even comprehend the content of trendy Flash animations or audio clips. Search engines want to find the content, and only the content. Since Web Standards separates your website's content from its design code into two separate files, search engines don't have to wade through hundreds of lines of design-related code to get to the meat of your site - its relevant content. For this reason, Standards-based sites are far more likely to receive favorable search engine listings, for the simple fact that they are easier for search engines to understand.
4. Reduced Maintenance Costs
Let's say you've just paid a local Web designer to craft a beautiful new website for your company. The site's online, the Web designer has cashed your check and left for a three week bike tour of Tuscany. One week into the trip, you suddenly need to make significant changes in the content of your website. Who you gonna call?
With a Standards-based site, it's no problem, because you or your staff can easily make the changes yourselves. That's the beauty of separating the complex code governing your site's graphic design from the simple code that governs its content. At Candlewood Web Works, we will train you or someone on your staff how to make the simple changes to your site's content, such as updating written content, or adding a new photo. All this results in significantly lowered ongoing maintenance costs, and puts control of your website back in your hands.
5. Super-fast download times
You may have noticed when you first arrived at our website that the site appeared almost instantly. Did your Internet service provider suddenly quadruple the speed of your Internet connection? We don't think so.
What happened is that Standards-based sites use significantly fewer graphical images for navigation and layout, compared with traditional websites. That's because the underlying technology, CSS/XHTML, is capable of simulating the effect of many graphical elements without actually physically downloading images. That means lightning fast download times, even on a dial-up connection. That's good news for your customer, who can now focus on buying your products, instead of waiting for bulky images to load. And that's good news for you.
6. Lower bandwidth costs
The underlying computer code of a Web Standards website is what's known as "code-light". This means the amount of code necessary to display your website is significantly reduced compared to the traditional technology. This not only results in faster download times, but significantly less bandwidth usage. If your site receives a lot of traffic, lowering bandwidth costs can mean real money saved.
7. Se Habla EspaÑol: Multilingual design means more customers
Web Standards means making your website available to ALL potential visitors. Well, 45 million Americans speak Spanish. Those 45 million potential customers buy goods and services like everyone else, but they are far more likely to buy from you if you offer information online in their native language.
And consider this: Does or could your company sell internationally? By simply adding a Spanish version of your website, you can expand your potential client base by 450,000,000 people in South America, Spain, and Mexico.
Candlewood Web Works is well-versed in designing bilingual websites. (The founder's wife is native Honduran). We can also optimize your site for Spanish language versions of Yahoo and Google so that anyone, anywhere in the world, using any Web-enabled device, can find your business.
Though our particular expertise is English/Spanish websites, if your customer base includes other ethnic communities or languages, we can readily arrange to translate your site into a wide variety of languages.
8. Rich new graphics capability
The new Internet Explorer 7 supports a graphics format (PNG Alpha Transparency) that other Web browsers have supported for years. This means that in the near future, as more and more corporate and individual Web users upgrade to IE7, you will be able to present much more realistic, three-dimensional graphics and photos on your website. A graphically richer user experience will translate into increased sales since your products can now be rendered with better definition and detail.
9. It's the Law (or Will be)
Did you know the U.S. Federal Government requires that all federal websites be designed according to Web Standards? So does the State of Connecticut. There's no law governing the U.S. private sector, yet. But in Europe, which is several years ahead of the U.S. in adopting accessible Web Standards, many nations, including England, require all companies to make every reasonable effort to make their websites as accessible as possible. The trend is decidely towards accessibility. Your company can get out ahead of the trend and convert to Web Standards today, or be forced by competition or legal rulings to convert five years from now. So give us a call today to start your conversion.
10. Bulletproof and Futureproof Your Website
When you decide to convert your website to Standards-based design, you are virtually assuring that your site will function 10 years from now as well as it does today, without any updates to the code. Why? Because Microsoft, owner of the market-dominant Internet Explorer, has committed long-term to support Web Standards. Once they commit, there's no going back, since Microsoft would never make future changes that would render the world's websites reotractively dysfunctional. So if you convert now to the Web Standards of the future, you will bulletproof and futureproof your website. Fix it once, and forget about it.
Now you're a believer
Dramatically boost traffic. Lower maintenance costs. Improve search engine ranking. Futureproof and bulletproof your online presence. The benefits of Web Standards are frankly compelling, but the vast majority of companies have yet to convert. They simply don't know yet. They will 5 years from know, when they're forced to convert. But you know today.
So please contact us, and get a critical jump on your competitors. Candlewood Web Works offers a complete suite of products to help your company convert to Web Standards. Follow this link to learn more about what we offer.
Inquiries: info@candlewoodwebworks.com