Standards for website design and development

People have been using every type of medium to promote and sell their products and services. Yet Internet is the best medium for this.  Attractive and catchy websites can pull attention of consumer towards their company thereby increasing their sales. However there are some standard for designing and developing websites.

There are not any obligatory web standards. Anybody can design and develop site according to his own initiative. However following the recommendations of institutes like W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), ISO (International Organization for Standardization), ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association), ensures the quality of sites, lowers the cost of production, makes sites accessible to most of the people and on most of the Internet devices. They require less bandwidth. They are extensible, easy to maintain and compatible with most of browsers.

There are following web standards.

Structural and semantic languages: Developer should use structural and semantic languages like HTML, XML, and XHTML.

Presentation Languages:  CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheet is a presentation language. There are three levels of this.

Object Models:  DOM stands for Document Object Model. Again there are three levels of DOM.

Scripting Languages:  ECMA which is advance version of JavaScript.

Additional Markup Languages:  Mathematical Markup Languages like MathML 1.01, MathML 2.0.

These were the languages and other aspects recommended by W3C to build standard website.

As written above the first thing is the code on site, it should be validated. The code doesn’t mean only HTML but also XHTML, CSS, JavaScript. The validation of code means it should be according to definition of doctype. The code should be semantically correct. It means each element in web page should have it’s conform value and purpose. Following these standards helps Google and other search engines to properly understand the each and every part of web page’s code. It provides great help for SEO.