Business benefits of web standards

BusinessWeek has published an excellent article on web standards this week. Short, readable and understandable, author Jessie Scanlon has managed to distill the evolution of web coding into meaningful business benefits:

“For companies with a Web presence—needless to say, most companies—CSS means "You can control you branding, your image, and still deliver content to users in the most appropriate style," [web standards advocate Jeffrey] Zeldman says.”

iMarc is absolutely committed to web standards; we produce completely valid XHTML web sites and applications. And that article really explains why this is of benefit: One site, all audiences, future-compatible, at a lower cost.

Of course, it's not a perfect world. We still have to work around browser-specific bugs. But when I look back on the sites I worked on in the late 90's and the hacks I put together to get them to render correctly on both Netscape and Internet Explorer, it's clear how very far we've come.

And from a business viewpoint, one of the greatest benefits is that valuable development hours aren't wasted on making variants for different browsers, but on implementing useful, informative web sites.