Have you ever visited a website where things didn’t display correctly? Today’s audience, with a shorter attention span than ever, won’t stick around to fight through a non-functional page for information. You’ll be lucky if they haven’t moved on after seeing broken images alone. There are dozens of browsers with different ways of handling your website. When is the last time you checked to see if your site was W3C Compliant?
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) publishes the most widely agreed upon standards for web design and other internet media (i.e. web applications, web authoring tools, etc.). Even if your site was written just last year, it probably needs a refresh to meet all of your potential customers’ expectations. With Smartphones now the status quo, and use of other mobile devices such as tablets growing in popularity at an exponential rate, a compliant mobile version of your site isn’t an option – it is a lifeline to future business.
Mobile devices aren’t the only thing changing. Just as the spoken word evolves over time, so does the language of the internet. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was first publicly debuted in 1991 documentation, and is now in its 5th version as of late 2011. Left alone to untangle the mess of available browsers and decide what to change, one would find their own discoveries obsolete by the time they were able to implement them. Teaming up with an experienced Web Design professional will take the hassle out of constantly updating your website to meet standards. Curious to know if your website is W3C compliant? Cut and paste or type your URL at http://validator.w3.org.
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