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Web Standards, Accessibility and the Benefits of Separating Style and Structure

If you were building a retail store in a shopping mall, chances are you would not make its entrance only wide enough for 85% of people in the mall to get through. You would probably make it so wide, in fact, that two or three people could walk through at one time. So why should it be any different on the web?

Vibe9 Design believes it shouldn’t. Therefore, we build accessible web sites with web pages all can see and view, including those with disabilities and alternative viewing platforms.

To achieve maximium web accessibility, Vibe9 Design buillds websites using CSS and XHTML, which are compliant with modern web standards set by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in collaboration with other bodies.

The Benefits of Web Standards

By adhering to modern web standards, you offer more ways for people to view your website. This not only conveys professionalism, but raises your opportunities for profitability and repeat visitors.

Web sites built with modern web standards come with other benefits too. In particular, sites built ‘to standards’ use CSS (cascading style sheets) for website design, and XHTML to mark-up page content. This enables form and function to remain separate.

A site built with CSS/XHTML enables your web pages to be interpreted by many different types of viewing devices. These include: modern web browsers, screen readers, PDAs, printers, text-only browsers, and cell phones.

A well marked up, semantically correct XHTML web page has the added benefit that search engines will have an easier time indexing it. Becasue the content on the page is properly laid out, search engines will be able to accurately judge its relevancy to its associated keywords. The result: better search engine rankings.

Another benefit to the separation of form and function, or more precisely, design and presentation, means that the design of your site can change without the need to go back and alter (or refashion) the content as well. This will save you time and money should you ever decide to re-brand your website and give it a fresh look.

The Results of Accessible Web Sites

Overall, some of the primary benefits to standards based web sites are: they help keep production and maintenance costs down, enable more types of users to view your web pages, and can help you to achieve higher search engine rankings due to leaner, semantically correct code.

At the end of the day, the results of building with web standards will speak for themselves in terms of the volume of visitors your site attracts, and the level of quality experienced by each visitor.

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