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Do Web Standards Really Matter To You?

I don't envy the company who is looking to have a web site designed in today's world. This goes triple for the company with very little knowledge of the web.

A few years ago, if you wanted a site designed, it was pretty simple. You found someone or some company claiming to have the necessary skills and tools, you hired them and you got a site. "Can you design a website?" was the main criterion that separated who you considered for the job and who you didn't.

We don't live in that world anymore.

Now we have "web standards" and "compliancy" to some mysterious organization known as the W3C. (Just who are they anyway? Do they have anything to do with aliens or government conspiracies? Why are they controlling what your site should look like?) We have "accessibility" issues and web sites that "validate." We have companies boasting how clean their "mark-up" is. And you better not go with a company who hasn't yet embraced CSS. And don't forget Flash, Javascript, HTML, DHTML, XML, and PHP.

Is your head spinning yet? Look, all you really want is a web site, right? Why does it have to be so complicated?

Well, to tell the truth, it doesn't. At least not for you. What's important to you is that you have a site that looks the way you want and meets your needs. What you care about is, "Does this site reach my customers?" Not, "Does this site meet some complex standards and validate?"

That's why we want you to forget about all that junk. Well, ok, it's not junk - to us. But to you it is. We don't want to sell you on how elegantly we can code your site because, frankly, we feel that's kind of like a contractor trying to sway you based on which brand of tools he uses. There are things you should just expect from your web designer and one of them is that they will put together a site that follows some standards.

At the end of the day, we don't want our clients proclaiming, "Wow, we received a site that is W3C compliant!" (The fact is, most sites, even big, corporate ones, aren't - and very few people care, except for us web designer folk.)

No, at the end of the day, we want our clients beating their chests and announcing to the world, "Freshly Squeezed Design gave us a great looking web site!" To us, and we hope to you, that's just a bit more exciting.

So, are you ready for a new web site? Contact us today to find out how we can help you.

This article is copyright © 2005 by Freshly Squeezed Design and may not be reproduced in part or in whole without permission.

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