Standards-based Web Design in Colorado
You've probably heard web designers mention web standards... but what exactly are they talking about?
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Standards-based Sites are Better for Website Owners
Standards-based sites are well-built. Their designers strive for validity, or error-free code (it's not always possible, but we get as close as we can). Their content, or data, is separated from presentation and style.
This is great for the owners of these sites - it means that a website can get a totally new look without disrupting any of the existing content. That it's easier, faster, and therefore less expensive to update. And that it often will perform better in the search engine rankings due to cleaner, more exacting code.
Building to standards helps reduce the costs of developing and maintaining sites, and helps ensure that they will function correctly well into the future. Standards-based sites are more accessible to more users. And they are a much better long-term value for the business owner.
Early Website Design
Early on, websites were built using tables. Hacks, or code tweaks for workarounds, were introduced to force them to work in every browser - things that worked in Mozilla did not work in Internet Explorer; non-standard browsers were the norm. Arcane bits of coding knowledge floating around the web and in the heads of designers made for a complete lack of consistency among websites and their builders.
Over time, so many websites that had been held together by hacks began to fail when new, more standards-compliant browser versions were released. Websites that were suddenly broken after 'working fine' for months or years are not something that most business owners understand - they just know that their site is broken and it must be someone's fault.
Enter Web Standards
Web standards are all about the separation of style from content - making the look of the site and the content of the site two totally different things. When you pull the presentation out of the data, you can change the look and feel quickly, leaving the content intact; this is part of the joy of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) rather than tables.
Most modern browsers - Firefox, IE7, Opera, Safari - do a pretty good job of supporting web standards. That is to say, well-built sites that work in one of these standards-compliant browsers should work in all the others. The browser industry is moving slowly but surely (for the most part) towards a standards-based web. This means less hacks and less risk of site failure when the next version of Browser X is released.
Many professional web designers today are not concerned about standards - tens of thousands are still using outdated methods and churning out invalid, badly-built websites that are inaccessible, slow, and not search engine-friendly. Do-it-yourself sitebuilder programs do the same. Books and classes as often as not teach outdated methods of development.
But the growing number of us that do design to web standards ensure that browser vendors will continue to improve their products. While doing so, we provide a better end product to our clients, one that won't break when the next generation of browsers is released, and one that's easier and less expensive to maintain.
Red Kite is a member of the Web Standards Group. This is what they have to say about the subject:
"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call 'web standards,' are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web."
"Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market."
This is a great place to learn more: 
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