When it comes to web design, one of the pieced of advice that is always offered is to ensure your web design is W3C compliant. Is it really that important?

W3C is a set of standards that ensures the correct use of code in a web site. If the web sites code is poorly written, then you may find your site, or one of the pages, either hanging half way through the load, or taking a very long time to load.

If a search engine bot visits your site and comes across one of the page hangs, it will stop reading that page and most likely move onto to another site. This means your pages are not going to be indexed and consequently not appear in the search results.

However, just because your web site is W3C compliant doesn’t mean it is ‘right’. Internet Explorer does not use the W3C format to render web pages. It uses it’s own proprietary method. So a site that is W3C compliant may not render at all well in Internet Explorer. Around 65% of all internet users still use this browser by default on their home computers.

With that in mind, if you design your web site to be W3C compliant, but don’t do a browser check, you may find that a large number of users are not seeing the page in the correct format.

In simple terms, is the W3C compliance important? The answer is YES, it is important. But DON’T stop there. Check for browser compatibility as well. If there are browser issues, fix them and then recheck your W3C compatibility. You may find you have to do a lot of tweaking until your web design has satisfied the browsers and the W3C compatibility test.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 3:13 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.