Designing With Web Standards In 2015
It’s difficult to remember that the Internet is just a baby, but the web as we know it today is only about 20 years old or so – just a drop in the bucket as far as technology is concerned.
Even still, the Internet has gone through at least a dozen or more different iterations ever since day one, even though the underlying technology behind the web (HTML) has remained pretty standard across the board. That being said, web designers – professionals and amateurs alike – have been doing everything in their ability to streamline and simplify all of the different javascripts, and elements that make up modern day websites.
The ones that they are able to agree on are defined as “web standards”, and it is critically important that you (or the web design company you’ve hired to tackle the project for you) are building websites off of the back of these standards today.
The value of web standards today
The number one reason that people need to be creating websites according to the latest web standards today has everything to do with speed, efficiency, safety, and “future proofing”.
You see, when you run off the rails and build websites that aren’t built using the web standards, you run the risk of creating websites that not everyone is going to be able to view in the same way. Because the sheer number of browsers out there is so fractured (there are dozens and dozens of desktop browsers, and a bunch more mobile browsers out there), it’s impossible to have websites that are perfectly rendered and represented across the board when they aren’t built on web standards. One of the most hated browser by web developers is the famous Internet Explorer (IE). The good thing is that Microsoft is aware of this and reboot their browser, Edge.
On top of that, it’s going to be almost impossible for anyone to modify your website if the code hasn’t been written to web standards. If your codes are willy-nilly and all over the place, things are really going to bog down significantly – and we don’t mean just your website!
Web standards really streamline the production of website design and development, but also help to keep the site safe, secure, while opening them up to being able to take advantage of the latest and greatest design technology. There’s really no good reason not to take advantage of web standards today!
Fall in love with HTML5 and bail on Flash
Even though it’s taken a lot longer than most people ever would have expected, Flash as a web standard is finally passing away and being replaced by HTML5 – the latest iteration of the basic underlying structure of every website in human history.
The folks over at Adobe got into a bit of a tiff with the folks over at Apple, and ever since then Flash has been dying slowly. Things have speed up ever since the introduction of HTML5, a new web language version that supports lightweight video that doesn’t require extra plug-ins and JavaScript the way that Flash does. HTML5 pages also load faster, are more stable, and are a lot more secure than those that using Flash.
You cannot to build an unresponsive website today and get it
Up until about four or five years ago, web designers really didn’t have a simple and straightforward way to display web designs the exact same way on displays and screens that aren’t the exact same resolution or size.
This was a major headache.
You see, when you don’t know what kind of screen size your visitors are going to use it’s impossible to create a web design that is going to look picture-perfect across the board. Those with smaller monitors (and once smart phones and tablets came along, smaller screens in general) weren’t going to be able to see everything on a design that had been built for larger displays, while larger displays were going to show tight and cramped designs that were kind of all jumbled together.
Today though, responsive web design reacts to the size of the display that it is being shown on, and adjusts the overall design of the page to that screen size and resolution so that everything is pitch perfect. This is all possible thanks to HTML5 and CSS3 working together, as well as a handful of other underlying technologies that support responsive design.
There is simply no excuse for not having a responsive website in 2015, especially if you’re working with web design company to get the job done right the first time around!
Content management system (CMS) streamline everything
Finally, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re using a content management system (CMS) – like WordPress, for example – to better manage, update, and extend your website in the future. These tools give you the opportunity to have an incredibly robust website without having to know everything there is to know about the world of web design and programming, but also makes it a lot easier to update, modify, or add new features and content to your site without fiddling with the underlying structure.