Thinking of contracting a web design company to build a new website or redesign your current one? Better check that they are familiar with web standards, if not you may be throwing a lot of your money away.

Why?

Many of today’s web designers build beautiful sites without using best practices and web standards. As a result your website's code is not up to the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C is a strict set of guidelines that ensures your site is accessible to everyone, deliverable to a variety of devices and returns more on your investment in the long-term.

At Newellcreations.com we've highlighted the main reasons to adhere to web standards:

• Simpler Development & Maintenance: Using more semantic and structured HTML makes it easier and quicker to understand code created by somebody else. Harness the power of XHTML & CSS site designs!
• Better Search Engine Rankings: The separation of content (text and keywords) and presentation (design) makes the content represent a larger part of the total file size. Combined with semantic markup this will improve search engine rankings.
• Faster Loading Web Pages: Less HTML results in smaller file sizes and quicker downloads. Modern web browsers render pages faster when they are in their standards mode than when they are in their backwards compatible mode.
• Compatibility with Future Web Browsers: When you use defined standards and valid code you future-proof your documents by reducing the risk of future web browsers not being able to understand the code you have used.
• Better Accessibility: Semantic HTML, where structure is separated from presentation, makes it easier for screen readers and alternative browsing devices to interpret the content.
• Simpler Adaptation: A semantically marked up document can be easily adapted to print and alternative browsing devices, like handheld computers and cellular phones, just by linking to a different CSS file. You can also make site-wide changes to presentation by editing a single file.