W3C Compliant Web Design

What is W3C Compliance

By following the W3C Standards your are making your website compliant. Web Standards are defined by recommendations given out at the W3C. They supply rules to which different web technologies should be used. By complying to their rules you are choosing to make your website accessible and compatible with as many different users as possible.

Do you design W3C compliant websites?

This website is fully compliant as it is regularly checked to have valid code. You can check any page yourself on 4D Web Designs by clicking the link "XHTML" which is at the bottom of every page (within the footer). We can design valid HTML / XHTML for our clients if that is what they require. Since we hand-code all pages we design for our clients this means we produce clean code which improves download time, compatibility and search engines will have a greater chance in fully indexing your website.

Shouldn't all web designers create valid code?

You would have thought creating perfect code would be top priority or at least important to any web designer. This is clearly not the case, out of a sample we took only 10% of web designers used valid code on their homepage. This may be due to the following reasons;

• The web designer / developer is not aware about web standards
• They are not capable of producing valid code
• They use a generator like Dreamweaver or FrontPage which most likely will not create valid code by default.

Valid code ensures that your website is compatible with many browsers, not just Internet Explorer which many web designers seem to think is the only browser people use.

You can check any website yourself. If you want to know if a website is valid code simply go to W3C Validator, and type in the url you want to check.

Read more further information about this on our Accessible Websites page.