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Are You Accessible?

If your site uses old technology, then probably not. Starkmedia explains how it builds better web sites using the newest technology to reach larger web audiences AND improve search engine performance.

Imagine opening up a telephone book to look for a Chinese food restaurant, only to find that the book is not alphabetically organized AND it’s entries are written in Swedish. Assuming you aren’t familiar with the Swedish language, your confusion turns to frustration as you flip through the pages. Ultimately, you abandon that particular phone book and continue your search using a competing directory.

Surprisingly, a lot of web sites are much like the Swedish/un-alphabetized phone book. They are built in a way that neither human web visitors nor search engine spiders can locate the information they need. Their pages might not load properly, the design might appear to be very outdated, or the site is poorly organized. Both visitors and search engine spiders become frustrated and give up, moving on to competing sites.

To avoid turning-off potential visitors and spiders, it is important that your site is accessible to all. This article will cut through the “techie speak” and explain how Starkmedia uses new web technologies to improve site accessibility along with search engine performance.

Meet W3C

To begin with, let us introduce you to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international association where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop web standards and guidelines directing the web towards its full potential. Jeffrey Zeldman explains it best in Better Living Through XHTML?: When properly used, W3C standards enhance accessibility and promise long-term durability for any document published on the web. If you care to reach the largest audience for the longest time possible, you want to work within the web standards, and where document structure is concerned, XHTML in combination with CSS is the way to go.

Why We Use XHTML

Using valid XHTML streamlines a web site’s code which avoids errors that inhibit site performance, bog download times and tangle up search engine spiders. XHTML markup ignites structural integrity, reduces file sizes, and enhances both search engines success and the overall accessibility of your web site.

Why We Use CSS

In order to maintain the crisp, clean, multi-browser friendly markup of XHTML, web developers pair it with a standard layout language called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS controls color, typography and the placement of elements and images on the page. Until recently, and even now, most web sites are built using tables. Unfortunately, the use of tables has many drawbacks. They produce invalid XHTML, litter complex layouts with “junk text”, are difficult to maintain, cause slow download time, and are unreadable to search engine spiders. All in all, tables fail in terms of accessibility for humans and search engine spiders.

A Winning Combination

Ultimately, the pairing of CSS with XHTML provides the following benefits:

• The use of CSS leads to a decrease in download time and ultimately, web users’ frustration. No one wants to lose a potential customer or client because they were tired of waiting for your web site to load. A single 10K CSS document can control the appearance of an entire website that consists of thousands of pages and hundreds of megabytes.
• CSS and XHTML help separate style from content, making the Web more accessible and opening it up to more powerful applications and technologies to come in the future.
• Sites built in CSS and XHTML require less updating and maintenance time. This is a great benefit if you own a site where information changes on a frequent basis.
• CSS and XHTML-based sites are search-engine friendly. As Andy Hagans mentions at alistapart.com, using XHTML/CSS separates style from content and eliminates interfering JavaScript, resulting in a more organized and readable web site structure. Search engine spiders love this as they are able to crawl, index, and rank pages more efficiently.

By implementing XHTML and CSS technology, your web site becomes more accessible to both humans and search engine spiders, expanding its reach on the internet. Starkmedia’s web developers have an excellent working knowledge of how the exterior and interior of a web site should be structured through the partnership of the “super” markup language of XHTML, the stylistic beauty of CSS, search engine optimization and an overall awareness of accessibility guidelines. To learn more about accessibility or any of the topics discussed in this article, call us at 414.226.2710 or click here.

A special thanks to Senior Designer Kristy Schomburg who contributed to and co-authored this article.