It is crucial for a company to have a strong internet presence in order to contend in today's competitive economy. Whether its online objective is to improve client relationship, sell products or generate leads, the experience delivered by a website should forge a connection between the company and its customers with effortless interaction.

A website is the application of ideas, technology and visual design in a perfect blend to passionately extend your brand's personality online.

F.A. Communications which is based in Montreal will gather all its expertise and passion in developing a successful solution suited for your needs and budget.

We love web standards, here's why we use web standards to build your powerful and attractive websites

It Improves User Experience: Less Bandwidth and Fast Loads

A well coded website reduces the amount of HTML code when used together with CSS. CSS transformed table-based layouts into CSS-based layouts. This reduces page size by 25 to 50% which translates into better user experience, according to Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen, users tend to close a web page when it takes more than 10 seconds to load.

The CSS file only needs to load once as it is then cached. The page load might be slightly higher for the first page but the savings in bandwidth are huge while accessing multiple pages over many visits.

It Improves Organic Search Engine Ranking Page Without Costs

Being well-ranked in search engines is particularly difficult and many companies invest a great amount of money on it. Hence, every little help is welcome. Semantic markup will greatly assist Search Engines robots in their indexing tasks. It is surprising still today to see the number of sites which do not include proper titles and descriptions in the meta. Many sites would greatly increase their Ranking by simply using proper tags for the content. Adding h1, h2, and h3, tags and so on gives proper structure to pages.

Search engine robots crawl the web to index it, but for ranking and indexing purposes they can only process text. Dynamic effects, such as those created by JavaScript, are not taken into account, and text rendered with graphics cannot be read and parsed either. Separating presentation from content increases the information/markup ratio, making CSS-based documents more pertinent with regard to the search terms, which makes them rank higher in search results. Using CSS to render titles instead of graphics also helps in this regard.

Web Standards pages index and rank properly with no need to worry about how a major search engine operates and artificially manipulate the results. Also Web Standards hugely reduces the concern of using different browsers.

It Increases Website Traffic: Maintain Contact With Your User On Multiple Platforms

Nowadays we can no longer afford to build a website for major browsers only, companies would be losing too much traffic since web sites are increasingly being accessed by a growing number of user agents other than browsers, or by browsers on different platforms - for example mobile telephones.

Web Standards allows us to deal with this paradox and making the wider contribution of making our content universally accessible to people in different social, medical and economic status.

It Eliminates Unwelcome Future Costs

The information produced for the web is written in HTML code, and most of it uses invalid HTML. Although this information is displayed correctly in older permissive browsers, it might not be the case with newer less permissive browsers or it might simply behave differently giving invalid markup. Using valid web standards-compliant markup ensures that the data will still be re-usable for a long time.

Coding to web standards does not mean producing less compelling content. As a matter of fact, almost anything taking advantage of proprietary extensions can be done in a standards-compliant way, with the added benefit of being cross-platform and future-proof.

By ensuring that a website is marked up in a consistent and standards compliant ways, the content base becomes a perennially reusable asset without any additional costs in the future.

It Reduces Costs of Maintenance and Site Operations

With the speed of the Web, maintaining a Web site can imply fairly big costs. Without a web standards-compliant Web site, migrating to new platforms or adding functionalities can be quite expensive.

One of the most important features of a successful site is constantly adding new and relevant content which can act as fuel for social media dialogue with the user community and search engines love new relevant content.

If your website structure is separated from content it will then be way easier adding new content.

Standards Embraces New Browsers

More and more browsers, other than Internet Explorer for Windows, are used to surf the web:

  • Windows: MSIE, browsers using Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, Opera, Safari
  • Mac: MS-Tasman (IE/Mac's rendering engine), Gecko-based browsers, Safari, Opera
  • Linux: Gecko-based browsers, KHTML-based browsers, Opera

Overall, 5 different rendering engines are used to surf the web using dozens of browsers on 3 platforms.

Testing each web page in every configuration is time consuming and time is money. Coding to web standards is then the best solution.

What does it all mean in plain text?

If you're going to ask someone to build your company's website, make sure the points stated above are taken into account and that web standards are being used, if not, you might be pushing users away, hurt your brand and waste your money.