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Due to spam attacks I had to password protect editing. The password is the web standard you use to define the presentation of a web site (in uppercase).

MACCAWS-Whitepaper-Benefits

• Introduction
• Standards and the Web
• Some common myths
• The benefits of Web standards
• How to embrace Web standards
• Appendix

The benefits of Web standards

Now let us take a look at the benefits of adopting Web standards. Incorporating Web standards into your projects can:

• lower your development costs
• lower your maintenance costs
• expand your audience
• lower your hosting costs
• increase your organization's profile.

To fully take advantage of all these benefits, adopt Web standards to their fullest extent and employ CSS-based layout method.

Cost savings during development

During initial development

In the traditional method of building Web sites, the process of changing presentational elements (such as colours and fonts, or even page layout) would involve going through every Web page to make the changes, and might also involve changing hundreds of spacer gifs and other graphic images on the site. Prototyping and changing the design mid-development becomes much easier when the content and style are completely separated and CSS-based layouts are employed.

Web standards have been designed to encourage the separation of content and presentation, so changing one need not affect the other. When altering or adding content, your Web authors need not touch the presentational information; conversely, to change the look of your site, they need only alter the descriptions for presentional elements in the CSS.

Confusion and disorganization due to the coding differences in large development teams is minimized when all authors required to code to a specific standard.

During redesigns

If you are employing CSS-based layouts and Web standards, and you wish to give the Web site a different look, it may be as simple as developing a new set of stylesheets and not the markup on each of the pages.

It is no longer necessary to use a templating system or an expensive CMS to change the presentational elements of a Web site. Whether you are changing the font or the layout of a Web site, if you have separated content and presentation, you can edit one CSS file to change all of the pages on your Web site.

A side-effect of incorporating standards into your long-term development process, is that your project will be much less dependent on specific habits of your Web authors. Further development work in the hands of skilled and standards-aware Web authors should be swift and efficient.

Cost savings during maintenance

Well-written, standards-compliant code is concise, clean and clear. For the average Web author, this means a great deal of time can be saved in the process of updating or altering content.

• CSS-based layouts allow authors to add new features or change page layout without having to edit each individual page
• Changes to colours or fonts a can be achieved site-wide very quickly — without the need to interfere with the content
• Updating your site to take advantage of new standards or improvements or changes in browsers is easier when all presentation information for your site is on one page.

Using standards ensures that your Web site has the built-in flexibility for growth and change.

Day-to-day cost savings

Every little bit of data that is transferred has a cost. Depending on your hosting service, you may be paying for every bit of data your audience downloads. The less unnecessary information your Web site sends to your audience, the cheaper it is to run your site.

• Significant cost savings are gained from the brevity and clarity of standard-compliant Web pages are the savings in bandwidth. Case-studies have shown that using CSS-based design, and separating the content from the presentation can reduce the weight of a site by 25 % to 50%. This also improves the user experience as smaller pages load more quickly.
• When employing separate CSS files referenced by all of the pages of your site, server and browser caches ensure that the style information will be downloaded only once per user.

Both these factors contribute to savings in bandwidth, which means it will cost less for you to run your Web site, merely by using the available technology to its best advantage.

Growing your audience

If your site meets accessibility and internationalization standards and guidelines, your site will automatically be available to previously ignored audiences.

• Efforts to meet internationalization standards mean that your Web site can be reached and used by people around the world. These efforts can also mean that when your company opens an office on the other side of the Earth, you won't have to redesign the whole site to ensure it works in a new language.
• By ensuring your site meets accessibility guidelines you may be avoiding costly litigation, or damaging complaints. Lawmakers around the world are including Web accessibility provisions in human rights laws or explicit laws that guarantee access (such as Section 508, The Disability Discrimination Act, etc). In addition to the legal ramifications, being accessible means that you are opening your business online to a greater audience, and hence opening the door for greater returns in the long term.

Improve your image, increase your returns

Adopting Web standards can be good for your business' image. It may add to your operating costs in the short-term but it enhances your image within their community. By choosing to adopt Web standards you are telling your customers that you:

• believe your content should be made available to anyone regardless of the technologies they choose to use.
• refuse to alienate anyone based on what they use to access your site and under which circumstance — you care about ach of their experiences.
• ensure that your Web site is accessible to all and you open your business and your content to an increased audience.

Using Web standards is not only best practice and good corporate citizenship, it also opens up opportunities for a larger and more loyal customer base, which can only benefit your bottom line.

Being a few steps ahead of the game

Because few companies are aware of standards, have thought about their impact, or have invested resources into exploiting their benefits, there is an opportunity for you and your company to seize a competitive advantage.

Web standards are designed to be extended and added to and to work together with future growth in mind. Web standards are a sound and sensible way for you to invest in the future because they enable you to:

• create Web development projects with room to grow,
• escape the risk of being bound to a proprietary technology that may become dated,
• adopt best practices,
• produce Web sites that are accessible to everyone,
• produce Web sites that are usable on any device.

Seize the opportunity to beat out your competitors and adopt Web standards.