Standards Compliant Web Design
Back in the days of Frontpage and FONT tags you did not have to be very careful when coding html. Most browsers would still render the html more or less correctly. You could even use 1 page for your whole website and pull all the content into the 1 page using iframes. Off course the page also contained lines of Javascript to do cool little roll-over effects and drop down menu's. However along came Google and stuck a spanner in the works. Google's spider could not read a page with Javascript and iframes. It got stuck on badly written code and ended up not being able to properly index your website.
Standards Compliant Web Design
The world wide web is rapidly moving towards XML. In the future XML is hoped to be the de facto standard for all encoding of information. To ease the transition from HTML to XML, XHTML was created. XHTML is a much stricter for of html and needs to adhere to strict rules when coded. The ideal standards compliant web page is marked up with XHTML and all other elements such as styling, Javascript, and media is linked in from external files.
XHTML Web Design
The structure of XHTML makes it easy for the search engine spider to interpret the code.Therefore it is very important to that the XHTML code does not contain any errors. The W3C specifies guidelines on how (X)HTML code should be written and how mark-up tags should be used. Websites that adhere to these guidelines are said to have valid code. (X)HTML code that contains errors, and does not validate according to W3C standards, can confuse spiders. This may result in partial indexing of the page or indexing the underlying mark-up tags as part of the web page content. The correct doc type also needs to specified, either transitional or strict.
A web page needs to be coded using XHTML and validated using the W3C validation tool.
CSS Web Design
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Styles define how HTML elements in a web page are supposed to look and how they are to be laid out. One style sheet is used to control the style and layout of multiple web pages. With CSS, all formatting can be removed from the HTML document and stored in a separate file. CSS gives the Webmaster total control of the web page layout from one file, and enables production of web pages with a high content to code ratio. It also helps structure the HTML code to achieve the right semantic order .i.e. you can position your h1 and main text content right after the head section. Search engine spiders favor correct, clean HTML code as it is faster to download and easier to crawl and index a page’s content.
All formatting of a pages content should be styles using external CSS.
Benefits of Standards Compliant Web Design
- Clean easy to develop code
- Faster loading pages and decreased bandwidth costs
- Complete Search Engine Visibility
- Marked increase in search engine rankings
- Increase in the websites usability and accessibility
If you would like to discuss how Standards Compliant Web Design can increase the exposure of your website contact me.