Having an experienced webdeveloper working on your website might mean the difference between your website working today, or being completely broken tommorow. There are a number of ways to future proof a website to account for changes on the web, some of which are discussed below.
What might happen?
Some of you may be aware that browser vendors such as Microsoft or Mozilla frequently update their browsers. The current incarnation of Microsoft's being Internet Explorer version 7.0 and Mozilla Firefox being 1.9 at time of writing. Browser vendors website rendering engine (a piece of software within them which handles displaying graphics etc) adheres to the specification laid down by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium who are the web's standards corporate body. If your website is not written according to the specification, you run the risk of your website falling apart in years to come.
The importance of web standards.
Is your website using the latest technology to ensure future proofing and structural integrity? Web standards are a set of open specifications designed to ensure that webpages are constructed correctly and will always be visible on all types of devices. simply put, web standards are the blueprints that developers should be building websites from. Just as hiring a shoddy workman to build a house might mean your home will develop structural problems down the line - the same is true in building websites. All too often web development companies take the easy way out and just build sites using old technology which requires little or no learning on their part, and is easy for them to implement quickly. We'll show you later on why this is bad news for you and bad news for the web as a whole.
Advantages of using standards.
Complying with standards can help your website appear higher in search engine queries. Due to the way in which content is organised (in a logical fashion) this helps machines (such as Google's search engine spiders) to parse and interpret the content you have correctly. It also enables other devices such as PDA's, mobile phones etc to correctly read your content. With the explosion of the mobile web over the next few years to come, this has never been more important for businesses.
How to tell?
Does your existing website comply? To find out you can either ask us for a consultation and free website evaluation, or take a look for yourself. In Internet Explorer Go to View > Source. If you find lots of table tags or td or tr tags then chances are your website is not semantically correct. If on the other hand you see div ul ol tags, you are more likely to be running a smoother website. Although this is not a foolproof way to determine if it is semantic or not, another way to give an idea is to go to the W3C's validator. This website performs a check on your website code agains the specifications to see if it conforms. Contact us today for a full website health check. As we are accessible web developers who utilise the W3C standards - all of our sites been validated prior to launch.
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