What are Web Standards?
There are two sets of web standards which should be of interest to you and both are defined by the World Web Consortium or W3C for short. The first is the standard which is applied to the actual code in the web page (to see the code in a web page, open the page in a web browser and then click "View -> Source" in Microsoft Internet Explorer or click "View -> Page Source" in Firefox (other browsers will have similar menu entries).
The W3C standards are effectively the 'grammar' of the HTML language. You can check the correctness
of your, or any other page, by visiting the W3C Validator. A correctly formed web page is said to be 'valid'.
The other set of standards are actually guidelines and are again issued by the W3C - they are the W3C Accessibility Gudelines or WCAG for short. These define the standard for accessibility
of web pages for those web site users who suffer from a hearing or visual impairment, typically.
Why are Web Standards Important?
The obvious answer to this is that it IS important to make your business web site accessible to everyone - people with impaired vision spend money too! They hold down jobs as Procurement Executives and Contract Managers and are probably not just responsible for spending their own money but that of the company they work for too! There is another reason why adherence to web standards and accessibility guidelines is important - and that is simply because if a web site is designed correctly and is easily readable by vision-impaired visitors using a text-only web browser then it will be easily read by the search engine spiders (which are really just text-only browsers).
How Do We Ensure Compliance?
We begin by building in accessibility from the start - we build the basic structure of the web site using just your text content and as little formatting information as is required. We then put your web site through a rigorous 30 point check against the WCAG action points and ensure that, as a minimum, your web site will bear the WCAG "A" logo.