If you are a Web professional new to the concept of Web standards and are undecided on whether you should spend the time learning about them or not, I have listed a few important reasons for doing so. You can read more about Web standard design here and here.

Real Web Professionals

Designers, developers and prospective clients will be able to look at your work and know that you are a person who keeps up with changes regarding online technology and trends.
Always ensuring that your skills are current and up-to-date will make you look like a real Web professional.

Good Looking Clients

Using Web standards combined with best practices for accessibility will give your clients the chance to talk about how they cater to all people and how they find it so important that everybody can use their services or find information about their products.
This will help you to avoid the bad publicity that can be caused by shutting out visitors who use different platforms, like Macs or mobile phones.

Maximise Traffic

Different visitors use different platforms to access websites found on the Internet and because millions of users surf the net on a daily basis, you don’t know which device these visitors will use.
By using Web standards reasonably, properly and efficiently you make sure that you have done your part in making your website compatible with the largest possible number of browsing devices.

Faster Load Times and Lower Bandwidth Usage

Generally a well-structured markup that separates structure and content from presentation is so much more compact and versatile. Pages will load so much faster and documents will be smaller, ultimately being faster for visitors to download.
All in all, times and costs will be reduced – provided of course traffic doesn’t increase.

Improved Accessibility

Using Web standards does not guarantee that all aspects and elements of your website will be accessible to visitors running from different platforms, but it is definitely a very good start.
Making sure that your documents are valid, well structured and semantic (for a definition of semantic follow the link) means that you are on course towards having an accessible website.

Better Search Engine Rankings

Well-written content, which is delivered through clean, well structured and semantic markup, will work wonders for search engine spiders and will only benefit your search engine rankings.
This of course, will lead to increased traffic, which is the main aim of the game.

Easier Markup Maintenance

Editing, inserting and removing presentation-free content is much easier and more efficient than wading through kilobytes of multiple nested lines of code.
Using CSS to control layout also aids in making everything so much easier.

Future Proof All Content

Separate content from presentation and always use current Web standards. This will ensure that you have done the best you can to make sure that your content can still be viewed and read on all levels.

Better Business Sense

• More online visitors
• Faster site overall
• Better search engine rankings

What’s Not To Like?

As designers and developers, along with other industry organisations like the W3C and WSG, we need to start working with business to show them how Web standards are better in every regard. From there, those that follow will demand standards, accessibility and semantics and all the benefits that these bring.