What a lot of web designers don’t know, or regularly overlook, is a set of best practices or standards for building websites published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Most pages on the World Wide Web are written in computer languages (such as HTML) that allow Web authors to structure text, add multimedia content, and specify what appearance or style the result should have.
As for every language, these have their own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written with these computer languages are supposed to follow these rules.
A common belief is that if the page displays correctly then it’s not worth the extra trouble to make it standards compliant. This is true, provided that you aren’t concerned about your website’s search engine page rank. Creating standards complaint pages may be more work, but cutting corners typically creates an inferior product in the long run.
Google and other search engines prefer pages that are standards compliant and well structured. Since it’s most likely that your website is a marketing tool, compliance with W3C standards will ensure your site functions properly, making it easily searched and viewed in a range of web browsers.
