Q&A - 1 - "Standards Compliance"

Welcome to the first of many Questions and Answers blogs from PurePages. We get many questions from our clients and from the general public. So we thought this an apt way of answering these queries, whilst making them accessible to everyone else.

So our first question is: "As a non-techy what does it mean to say that a site is standards compliant? And how will this affect my website?" - from So Sumi

Well firstly let me say in my eyes there are two sets of standards in web design and development. There are rules of best practice [generally accepted by the web community] and also the standards of W3C (for the mark-up languages), the other is the environment standards (this is how the site behaves in a browser), this can include anything from font, to colours and beyond.

We say a site is standards compliant (at least at PurePages) when the site not only validates in W3C and bobby but also when it has had usability testing completed and appropriate changes made (the project cycle). This means that each site we release is not only valid (when coded in-house) but is also accessible to the audience, regardless of who they are and what disabilities they may or may not have. Also for PurePages standards include looks and layouts, ensuring that as well as functionality we supply top quality websites.

So what effect does it have on your site then? Well to be clear, standards make your site accessible to everyone, regardless of the fact they may or may not have a disability. But more than this they make your site continuous between browsers, keeping your brand intact.

However you have to be careful, certain browsers are not fully standards compliance and developers are having to pull dirty tricks to make the site look compliant in them. By certain browsers I mean Internet Explorer 7 and below, although 7 has helped a little. (A review of the Beta for IE8 will be online soon). On the other hand Firefox and Safari are much more standards compliant, though nowhere near perfect.

One last note. Although standards can maintain your brand and design it is important to remember that a little variance in design between browsers can make people remember your site a little more because it has appeared to change slightly even if it hasn’t.

Website Navigation

This week we felt our website needed some minor changes to make it a bit more fluid. One are we felt needed the most consideration was the navigation. A recent article in Web Designer magazine illustrated really well how we all have predefined layouts of our houses as one example (like you would know if you went to my house where the best to look for my socks would be). But the same can't be said for websites. The article also highlighted a survey recently that found that a bar across the top of the page that remains constant throughout the site lead the least number of errors. So that's one part solved - where to put the main navigation.

But we also felt that we need to make navigation inside the different subsections clearer too. A good example of the sort of thing we liked was the idea of thumbnails of each project inside the subsection. I can't make my mind up though on whether a patterned border to the page (allowing for widescreen monitors etc...) are a good idea. I think it would have to be an inoffensive yet stylish design to pull it off well.[1]

But that is off the point slightly. The key it seems is making sure the user knows where they are on your site but can also get back to the home page easily and also reach other pages easily without having to go to the homepage first.

1. Headscape & BoagWorld - use background images very effectively

[edit - ak]

This week's work

So this week we've been trying to update a lot of stuff. Mainly websites we did ages ago that seem to have been forgotten about that need updating drastically. But other than that we've been trying to update ourselves too so getting a few things in order that were kind of needed too - think spring clean in terms of administration but in the summer instead.

In getting a few things sorted did we come across a couple of nifty sites. For any hardware requirements we found www.gammaglobal.com very helpful. For web design trends in 2008 we thought www.webdesignerwall.com was chock full of excellent ideas and examples of cutting edge design. On a slightly different subject if any of you are involved in Google Analytics then their own official blog is worth checking out too.