Weio - Web Design & Development

All the websites that we make are W3C Valid! And that's important in today's world, with so many users on so many types of operating system and internet browser.

There are a lot of web design companies out there that say the are "W3C Valid" and follow "HTML5 Standards", yet upon inspection - neither is true. 

There is a simple way to check if your site is W3C Valid, simply visit http://validator.w3.org/ and enter your web address. If your website fails validation it will turn red and outline the errors on your site.

Feel free to check weio.co.uk, and all the sites we've created, and you will see what a valid website looks like. Here's weio.co.uk: Click Here

So here's a bit more on the importance of W3C validation,

What does "W3C Valid" mean?

The W3C or World Wide Web Consortium is an international web monitoring standard for the internet. The objective of the W3C is to ensure that all websites and their components work effectively without any glitches. In order to achieve its purpose the W3C has laid down a protocol of web design which your website needs to adhere to.

Following these guidelines would boost the success of your website by leaps and bounds. Incorporating the W3C standard into your web design would restrict the amount of coding on your pages and make the content more accessible to your visitors.

Doing so would make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your web pages and index them. This would greatly increase your page rank on search engine listings and enhance the visibility of your website.

Here are some of the benefits your site would enjoy if your web design is W3C compliant:

• SEO Friendly – By adhering to the W3C standards for your website, you would make it very SEO friendly. Having an SEO friendly website in today’s business climate is extremely necessary. The W3C standard would ensure that your site is optimized and easily accessible by search engine spiders. This would boost the visibility of your site phenomenally.
• User Friendly And Easy Accessibility – The success of all websites depends upon how navigable or user friendly their website is. By incorporating the W3C standard compliant code your website would function optimally on any device. This would create a pleasant browsing experience for your users and they would keep coming back for more.
• Very Easy To Maintain – The W3C standard being a universal one, consists of a standard coding style. Incorporating this code into your web design would make it very easy to maintain your website.
• An Effective Quality Gauge – The W3C is also a useful quality yardstick. Using this code you can determine whether your web design is outdated or is in sync with the latest design standard specifications.

As an online marketer the success of your business depends a lot on how best you can create a positive impression in the minds of your customers. Thus having a web site with an appealing and structured web design can help your business prosper considerably.

Your website is an online representation of your business. This makes it essential for your design to render correctly on the screens of your customers without any glitches. While choosing a web designer for your site, you should ensure that they adhere to the W3C standard.

Validation, as any process of debugging code, is sometimes difficult, and the vast improvements in automatic error correction has made modern browser cope very well with errors in HTML or CSS. This makes validation seem useless or costly to many people, and the following questions (or statement) are widespread:

“My site looks right and works fine - isn't that enough?”

The answer to this one is that markup languages are no more than data formats. So a website doesn't look like anything at all! It only takes on a visual appearance when it is presented by your browser.

In practice, different browsers can and do display the same page very differently. This is deliberate, and doesn't imply any kind of browser bug. A term sometimes used for this is WYSINWOG - What You See Is Not What Others Get (unless by coincidence). It is indeed one of the principal strengths of the web, that (for example) a visually impaired user can select very large print or text-to-speech without a publisher having to go to the trouble and expense of preparing a separate edition.

“Lots of websites out there don't validate - including household-name companies.”

Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury?

Even if you can, do you want to risk being on the wrong side of a lawsuit if your site proves inaccessible to - for instance - a disabled person who cannot use a 'conventional' browser? Accessibility is the law in many countries. Whilst validation doesn't guarantee accessibility (there is no substitute for common sense), it should be an important component of exercising "due diligence". It is now just over a year since a court first awarded damages to a blind user against the owners of a website he found inaccessible (Maguire vs SOCOG, August 2000).

“Validation means boring websites, and stifles creativity”

That might have been the case a decade ago, when validation was the tool of choice of people more interested in harnessing the power of the markup languages than creating beautiful designs for their content; when many designers were not taught basics of Web technology and would create beautiful but fragile and unreliable web sites.

This argument is completely moot today. In the past decade, most of the stunning, content and design-rich Web sites were built with standard (X)HTML, CSS and scripting.