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The Importance of Web Standards
Web standards are prevailing guidelines used on the World Wide Web to ensure web sites and information is accessible to all in the most efficient manner.
Web standards are defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international industry consortium dedicated to "leading the Web to its full potential". It's led by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, and backed by more than 400 member organizations - including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, America Online, Apple Computer, Adobe, Macromedia, and a variety of telecommunications companies and other institutions.
Now that we know the objective of Web standards, let's look at why this is important to the business community.
Increased On-line Exposure
Web standards compliance can give your web pages greater visibility on the web across all the modern search engines. The highly structured information present in compliant web documents makes it easy for search engines to evaluate and rank the information in those documents. As a result, Web standard compliance, combined with a holistic on-line marketing campaign, can directly translate into increased exposure and brand awareness in the on-line arena.
Information Versatility
Versatile information saves critical time and money by reducing waste in converting information to different formats. Compliant documents can easily be converted to other formats, such as databases or Word documents. This allows for more versatile use of the information within an organization and on the World Wide Web.
Accessibility
Web standards provide consistent accessibility to your organization's information. Denying access to even small portions of a target audience can make a tremendous difference to profit margins. Additionally, this helps the web to be used by people with disabilities, and allows web pages to be understood by people using browsers other than the usual ones - including voice browsers that read web pages aloud to people with sight impairments, Braille browsers that translate text into Braille, hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, teletext displays, and other unusual output devices (W3C).
Web Site Stability
If your site is unstable, so is the delivery of your organization's value proposition on-line. The majority of web standards are designed so that data using old versions of the standards will continue to work in new browsers, allowing more maximum target market exposure.