I am often asked to com­ment on the web designs of friends and asso­ciates. It’s a tricky sit­u­a­tion for me. Regardless of the visual design, which is usu­ally fine, often, I find prob­lems under­neath the hood that are dif­fi­cult to explain. What I find are sites designed with tables-based lay­outs, using older HTML tech­niques. Today, I’d like to make the case for why you should dis­card that old way of design and move to standards-compliant design.

1. Accessibility

A web design done with stan­dards in mind is broadly acces­si­ble. I have noticed that the SF/F fan­dom is par­tic­u­larly accept­ing of those with hand­i­caps and dis­abil­i­ties, but many SF-related web­sites do not take these fans into con­sid­er­a­tion. A prop­erly designed web site takes makes allowances for the use of screen read­ers and other acces­si­bil­ity tools. Tables based designs make a mess of this. Accessibility is a small part of standards-based designs, based on the num­ber of peo­ple that it effects. But do you really want to run the risk of alien­at­ing any poten­tial fans?

2. Ease of Maintenance

With css/xhtml-based designs, the con­tent is sep­a­rated (mostly) from the pre­sen­ta­tion. Here’s what this means: say you have a new book com­ing out that you want to pro­mote. If your site is built with old tech­niques, updat­ing your design involves a com­plete tear­down and rebuild. However, if your site has been built with stan­dards, you could sim­ply replace the stylesheet and have an entirely new design that reflects your pri­mary project. In gen­eral, these web­sites are very easy to make changes for, as far as pre­sen­ta­tion is con­cerned. Don’t like that link color? Edit the CSS, and it’ll change across the site.

3. SEO Implications

A standards-based design takes search engine opti­miza­tion into account straight away. Proper page struc­ture, even if it is not per­ceived by humans using browsers, will be picked up by index­ing ser­vices. Building your site with stan­dards in mind does not auto­mat­i­cally mean higher rank­ings, but it cer­tainly helps.

4. Less Bandwidth Intense

Standards-based designs are lean and quick. CSS is down­loaded once, whereas in the old way, the pre­sen­ta­tion would be down­loaded over and over again. Your file sizes are all-around smaller, which means a faster web­site, and hap­pier visitors.

5. Your web­site is like the cover of a book.

A standards-based design can look good or it can look bad. But more often than not, they look pretty good. Your web­site is like a book cover. Whether you know it or not, poten­tial read­ers are eval­u­at­ing whether or not to pick up your work based on your web­site. They may not even know it–it may just be sub­con­cious. But good design facil­i­tates the pre­sen­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion, and you are in the busi­ness of sell­ing that. Your web­site should reflect a level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism at least on par to the cover design of your books. Don’t com­mit a sin on the level of the SFWA web­site, please.

Afterword

Despite all this, I am not a stan­dard­sista. Sometimes to sat­isfy the desires of your client, you need to bend the stan­dards a lit­tle, and I still sleep okay when I have to do so. Like any­thing, you can go over­board with the idea of standards-based design. But in gen­eral, the above are some very good rea­sons for hir­ing a pro­fes­sional designer who is famil­iar with stan­dards to pro­vide your site–or if you are a do-it-yourself-er, pick­ing up some books on XHTML and CSS. This is the part where I plug me. You already know I do web design, but if you’re inter­ested in learn­ing more about my client process, visit my free­lance infor­ma­tion page.

Tagged as: Cascading Style Sheets, Graphic Design, My Writing, Search engine optimization, SF, Web Design