Dream Row’s developers are a technical bunch. We like to talk about the nuts and bolts of code and what makes the web work. When we do, we try not to get too technical on people; however, we sometimes slip a little, especially when it comes to the idea of web standards and our approach to web site development and SEO.

Why?

Many reasons, really. Here are our top three.

1. Search Engine Optimization

We like HTML (the “markup”) to be as minimal as possible, to convey meaning rather than visual formatting, and to be easy for search engine programs to catalog and rank. Devoting plenty of effort to creating a solid foundation based on web standards is well worth it, because it makes the search engines’ jobs much easier. The result? A better shot at good ranking.

By the way, when we start an SEO campaign on a typical web site, it generally takes $1-2k in work to get it standards-compliant and ready. When we do the development from the beginning, that work is already done, minimizing SEO startup costs. The benefit is a site that hits the ground running. That’s kind of a side point, though. On to our second reason:

2. Compatibility

Most web sites work perfectly fine in the browser the developer used, on the platform the developer ran. That much is a given; anybody with a simple web editor can do that. The difference between that and professional web development is vast. A standards-based web site works:

• in any web browser
• on any operating system
• on any device
• by any program

…that wants to consume the content on the site. Odds are that the majority of your site’s visitors will be people using something like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Opera on a Windows PC or a Mac. However, you likely don’t want your web presence to exclude people on Blackberries, iPhones, Android devices, iPads, or other mobile devices, do you? What about screen readers for the vision impaired? It takes a professional group with expertise in web standards to build sites that have this level of cross-platform/device compatibility.

Oh, and you may have noticed how this ties in with the first point (and extra points to you if you saw it): what are search engine spiders but special vision-impaired programs that don’t have a web browser but still want to read your site? They’re the most common non-browser device there is!

3. The Future

This is a fairly simple extension of the second point. A few years ago did anybody outside of Apple Inc have any idea that they’d be releasing a hybrid iPod/phone device? Nope. So what happen when the iPhone hit the market? Did we need to rebuild all of our web sites with a special iPhone version? Not at all—because we built to web standards. The same thing happened when Google released Android. The same thing will happen when the next big (or little!) environment comes out.

Living by web standards makes your web site future-proof. Web standards are methods and conventions that we all agree to follow for the sake of compatibility. New devices might work differently from old ones internally, but you can bet they work best in a standards-compliant environment. Building to standards now saves re-development costs tomorrow.

It’s an Issue of Quality.