The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has produced a series of recommendations for accessibility and usability of websites. Put simply, the aim is to make sure that websites are usable for as many visitors as possible. The Standards encourage best practices such as not using table- or frame- based site design; allowing users to change text size; and making sure that sites render correctly in as many browsers as possible. It's worth complying with these standards for a number of reasons.

Firstly, for the experienced designer, a standards-compliant site takes less time to build, which means it can go live more quickly. If your designer is competent in CSS, hiring a second designer to add in JavaScript hacks will be unnecessary. It's also possible to run your html (or xhtml) through a validator, which will check for errors cross-platform. This also means that making different versions of sites for different browsers is no longer necessary.

These are short-term savings, but there are long-term financial advantages as well: pages will be smaller as large images and tables are cut out, resulting in a huge reduction in data transfer usage, especially for larger and more popular websites. Maintenance expenses will also be cut, as adding new content is a far simpler procedure than with most non-standards-compliant sites. Major visual and structural changes can also be implemented with CSS, meaning that the original designer doesn't always have to be brought in to maintain the site.

Another benefit is that xhtml degrades gracefully in older browsers, and is designed to be "future-safe"; extensive future redesigns will not be necessary. Xhtml sites can also work on mobile phones and PDAs.

Then there are the marketing benefits. Search engine optimisation is much easier because the search engines don't have to sort through dozens of table and font tags or superfluous spacer images to find the actual content of your page. This can be a worthwhile booster for your rankings. What is more, you can easily launch new content and designs very quickly, and remove old or irrelevant content.

And that's not to mention the benefits to your site visitors, which are perhaps the most important. Many older or visually impaired users will appreciate you leaving them the ability to change font sizes as they wish without ruining the layout of the site. A standards-compliant site will also support the use of the screen-read function. Pages load faster, and are compatible in any modern browser on any platform, meaning that your website will reach the maximum number of users.

For more information on Web Standards and compliance, see http://www.webstandards.org/ The Web Standards Project and the World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/.

By Natalie Catchpole

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