Do You Comply?

Pictured: The culprit

A properly developed website should take into account the plethora of potential technological barriers that the design may face across a multitude of internet browsers – and there are plenty: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Mobile Safari… and those are just the major browsers. There are still oodles of other browsers out there that people are using to view the web, and they all display web pages differently. The challenge that web developers face is to keep your magnificent website design from exploding in a supernova of jpeg-ized failsauce.

Due to the fact that every browser has particular features that it will or will not support, it’s a difficult balancing act to make them all play nice. This requires the developer to forgo proprietary code that may only be supported by one browser in favour of more recognized standards. Web standards are set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) made up of member organizations that set code standards for code. Of course, none of the standards are mandatory, so it’s up to each browser to adopt new standards as they come and not every browser is quick to the draw. Some may take several months or years to include newer standards, so in the meantime your website developer will need to include a mix of different code and different technologies to appease a variety of browsers.

Hopefully your web developer is a trained professional.

So if not every browser is standards compliant, then why does my site need to be?

The answer is you’re staying ahead of the game by planning for the future. You don’t want to be stuck a few years down the road with a site that no longer works in newer, standards compliant browsers. Which standards you comply with should be a discussion between you and your web developer. There are many options and many factors to consider between browsers that include coding, styling, scripting and more. The more you discuss and plan with your developer even before the design phase of your website begins, it will help ensure that your website comes out looking like a million bucks no matter what browser chews it up and spits it out.

If you’re wondering how future-proof your website is, contact Point Click Media.