What Are Website Standards?

These days it's not good enough to just have a website. These days sites need to meet certain minimum standards. Doive Designs work to meet as many of the web site standards as possible including those listed below:

W3C HTML 5 compliance

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are responsible for setting standards for the internet. Compliance means that all browsers should display the site in the same way.

All of our new websites are coded using the latest version of HTML, which is currently HTML 5. This new coding standard is still being rolled out, so not all of it's features will work in all browsers.

W3C CSS compliance

In the same way, by complying to the style sheet standards, each website will be compatible with as many browsers as possible and aids with accessibility.

The latest version of CSS (CSS 3) is now being used on all of our new websites. Like HTML 5, this new version of CSS is still being rolled out. Not all of the features are supported by today's browsers, so we currently only those features that have been widely implemented or in ways where the usability of the website will not be adversely affected.

Accessibility standards

In the UK, all websites need to be accessible by everyone, including those who physically or visually impaired. For example, blind or visually impaired website users may use a screen reader which does exactly as it sounds. Unfortunately, to a screen reader many images or Flash websites are completely invisible. This is because steps haven't been taken to make sure that "alt" tags on the page contain a descriptions of the image - especially important when an image is being used as a link.

By following certain simple guidelines a website we make sure that your website will be accessible to everyone.

Browser / Platform compatibility

As you are likely aware, there are many different website browsers. Unfortunately different browsers (Internet Explorer 7-9, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc...) display web pages slightly differently, and implement different website standards. So just because a website looks fine on one computer, doesn't mean it will look that way to everyone.

To make sure that your website will always display properly, we check all of our websites in all the most popular browsers.

Mobile and Tablet Friendly

If you have just come out of stasis or are doing a bit of time travel you might not know about the massive change in how people now use the Internet - the mobile phone. In fact, people are now far more likely to view a website on their phone or tablet than on a "traditional" computer. So making sure that your website also appears correctly on a mobile device is more important than ever before.

In most cases this means preparing a "reactive" version of the website meaning that the content is displayed so that it is most appropriate to the size of the screen being used and so that text is at a size that can be easily read without zooming in. All this is now done as standard on all our new websites.

If you have an older website, converting it so that it is mobile friendly is (as a general rule) about a day's work.

More Information

We carry out all of these checks as standard on every new website we set up. We also perform checks and upgrades to our customer's websites in order to keep them up to scratch. If you have a website, and you're not sure whether it meets these standards, please contact us for a check-up.

For more information on this topic, please see the following links: Wikipedia: website validation or Cynthia Says: accessibility standards.

As standard we set up websites so that they appear in the search engines, though we cannot guarantee a good ranking based on these factors alone. SEO is an ongoing process.

Back to News