Benefits of Accessibility
Improved search engine rankings
A page coded to standards like those set by the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium will work with more devices (more accessible) and in turn perform better in search engines.
Search engines need to be able to access your content to be able to catalogue or index your page properly. A well coded page will enable the search engine to quickly and accurately gather all relevant information from your page.
A well coded page is easier to optimise for search engines and is an excellent first step towards search engine optimisation (SEO).
Easier maintenance
An accessible design including standards based coding and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is easier to maintain as the presentation (text colours, background images, layout etc) is separated from the content.
Changing the font or text colour, even changing the graphics in a page layout can be completed quickly as there is no need to modify every page. This means we can perform updates and modifications in the most efficient and cost effective way.
Pages load faster
A standards based design with CSS for presentation will load quickly for your visitors. As the presentation is separate from the content the visitor only needs to load the content for each new page visited. Parts of the page that are common across the site (like your logo, background colour, layout etc) only need to be loaded once.
The use of CSS speeds up your page load times significantly even for those who are not on broadband (still half of the UK) as the pages load more efficiently.
Because of this increase in efficiency the server your website is hosted on will require less resources. One key resource is bandwidth or the amount of traffic your website receives. With a standards based site styled with CSS your bandwidth usage would be lower.
Accessibility and compatibility
Making your website accessible means making it accessible to everyone - regardless of technology. People access the internet and websites in lots of different ways including hand held devices like PDA's and mobile phones.
A carefully coded page will work better with a varied range of devices. Try testing your website on the Opera Mini Mobile Phone Simulator - this will show you what your site will look like on a mobile phone.
Contact Make Hay to find out what we can do for you and your visitors.