Website Coding Standards

When having a brand new ecommerce website designed and built for your company, you need to feel assured that all the appropriate steps have been taken to ensure that the website is fully functioning. Many stages of testing are of course carried out through the build of the ecommerce website to ensure that every aspect works but other factors also need to be taken into account to ensure overall ecommerce success. Website coding standards is one of these aspects that needs be correct from when the ecommerce website goes live as it can affect how the website ranks in the search engines. These web coding standards are not noticed during the on page testing so many ecommerce solution companies may over look these standards.

Below are the two main website coding standards that must be adhered to throughout the website to ensure that the website has the best possible chance of climbing the search engine rankings.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Compliancy

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web, which is abbreviated to WWW or W3. The consortium consist of member organisations that maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working all together in the development of standards for the world wide web.

The main idea behind W3C compliancy is to ensure that websites and ecommerce websites are achieving certain high industry standards to ensure that the internet is providing a high level of service. Prior to the creation of W3C compliancy, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, which increased the potential for inconsistency between the web pages on the websites. The idea behind this W3C compliancy is that all of the vendors agree on a set of core principles which are supported by everyone.

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), looks at the accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work which are technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development. The Web Accessibility Initiative looks at the accessibility of the website especially for disabled users. Functionality such as verbally reading out the alt tag on an image is looked at as these functions can be extremely useful, especially with partially sighted users.

Advansys not only deliver a fully functioning website to a very high standard but we also make sure that the coding is of the highest quality and conform to these web standards. Not only is this good practice but any errors, especially on the home page of an ecommerce website, can affect the search engine optimisation of the website. With a large amount of experience of search engine optimisation with many of our clients, we know exactly what needs to be implemented in order for the website to climb the search engine rankings.

For more information on W3C Compliancy, WAI Compliancy and search engine optimisation, please contact our ecommerce experts.