Although we web designers and developers rave on about how important web standards are, many clients still don’t realise what the business reasons for adopting them are. There are various good reasons to use well formed XHTML with CSS for web page construction. These fall generally into three main categories.

Accessibility

From a Business perspective, every user is a potential customer, if you make life difficult for them then you can pretty much guarantee to have lost their business. If you ran a shop, you wouldn’t put in stairs just to keep out wheelchair users, you wouldn’t ban guide dogs and you wouldn’t install low ceilings to keep out people over a certain height.

If a site does not work well with non visual browsers then a large number of potential customers are effectively being shut out. Standards based web sites adapt to different delivery platforms so enable all users to successfully navigate the content.

XHTML compliant web browsers are more and more common in modern mobile phones and PDAs. In a similar way that a standards based website works for non visual browsers, the content can be reformatted for the smaller screens of mobile devices.

Marketing

One of the many factors in determining search engine rankings is the quality of the website content. Many of the search engine ‘crawlers’ (the software that creates an index of the site) will only look at a certain quantity of the page information. By taking the formatting information out of the page source, the crawler will be able to index more relevant content than if it was discarding large quantities of formatting code. This results in better search engine indexing and higher rankings.

Getting good search engine rankings is vital to successfully marketing a website, this is why SEO consultants can charge large amounts of money to businesses who have built a website but need potential customers to find it. One of the things that almost all SEO consultants would recommend is ensuring that the website is built to comply with current web standards. It therefore makes sense to build your website in this way to begin with. I expect that it’s an all too common story that a company has to pay to have the site built and then pay for somebody to come and tell them that they need to pay to get it re-built.

Manageability

Lean content markup and CSS formatting make for websites that perform faster and use less network bandwidth. There is also less code to be worked with when modifying content or adding content to the site. Ongoing maintenance can become focused on real advantages rather than drawn out code alterations throughout an extensive site.

A Standards based approach allows your web content to be re-purposed very quickly. If there was a revolutionary new Internet delivery platform that quickly took a majority share of web browsers, the standards based websites could adapt within days, minimising the revenue loss that older website would incur due to the amount of time required to reformat their content.