Usability Issues and How They Affect You:
:: usability :: XHTML :: CSS :: accessability :: standards-compliant ::
:: cross-platform/browser funtionality ::
Many web developers will throw these buzz words at you. But what do they mean? Why should you care about them? How are they going to make your website stand out and make you money? Why should you care that we use XHTML and CSS to develop your website?
The Benefits of Using Valid Standards-Compliant Code
In the past, when standards were considered optional, all browsers would display the same code differently. Therefore, to get any consistency across browsers and platforms, developers had to spend their time and your money developing proprietry code for all the browers available. By using validated standards-compliant technology, such as CSS and XHTML, the code developed will display nearly identically in all standards-compliant browsers. Therefore, more of your developer's time can be spent on enhancing the user's experience, which can only be a good thing. Futhermore, when a new version of a browser is released, the standards-compliant page will not break. In addition, for the small minority of users still using legacy browsers, the page will be adequatly displayed in a readable format.
In the same vein, as technolgy advances, so does our abilty to be mobilely connected to the Internet through a variety of devices. These include mobile phones, PDAs, and so forth. If proprietry coding is used, these devices are unlikely to be able to load your website. So, what happens then? You pay your developer to develop yet another website, specifically for these devices. The bottom line is more cost to you and a longer development period for your website.
When pages are written "correctly" and efficiently, they will display quicker in a user's browser, and this can only enhance their experience. You must know from personal experience that if a page is not loading quickly enough you will go to a competitor's site. This is an unecessary loss of potential clientel, and therfore easily can be avoided when valid standards-compliant code is used.
Defending Poor Coding Practices
There are, unfortunatly, many developers who will tell you that none of this matters. That the majority of your website users use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and they would be wasting their time and yours developing a site using CSS and XHTML. They will try to convince you that you can get consistencey throughout your website by using tables to format the page and including formatting information on the web page. Unfortunatly, the use of tables will mean the website takes longer to load, is less accessible, and changing something as simple as the font-type will take a lot longer.
I'm sorry to say this but these kind of developers are lazy and are doing you a disservice. Are they going to pay your costs when you are sued for not complying with the Disability Discrimination Act? Are they going to redevelop your website when more of your users use an alternative browser to Internet Explorer (IE)? Currently, over 20% of people on the Internet use one of the many alternatives to IE. This figure will only continue to grow as users become more knowledgeable and more comfortable with new technology. Within the IT industry today, over 35% already use an alternative browser.
How Do You Know The Code Used is Valid?
So, you have a developer telling you their code is standards-compliant - how do you check? Easily. The organisation that introduced the standards, The W3C, have a service allowing you to check the code of any page. To check the HTML/XHTML of a site go to the HTML/XHTML validator, and to check the CSS of a site go to the CSS validator. On all our websites there are links at the bottom of the page that you can click on to check the validity of our code.
Accessibilty
Accessibility is intertwined with usability. Although they are aiming at a similar goal (an enjoyable and successful experience on websites), they both have a different focus. For our take on accessibility please visit our accessibility section.