The next time your pocket buzzes or your purse rings, think of this: While the technology behind mobile phones adds convenience, it has also created an expense. There is a trade off. Especially if you still pay for a landline, which most of us do.

Wouldn't it be nice if, for once, technology allowed you to save time without adding cost? Without paying for it some other way?

Fortunately, there are web standards - free and non-proprietary guidelines for enabling the different parts of the web to speak to each other without obstruction or confusion between sites and the method in which they are viewed (PDAs, phones, internet refrigerators, various browsers on your personal computer, etc.).

Web standards make the web, well, standard. Universal. What a novel idea. And these standards, specifically for HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) code, make it easier to manage your brand online.

Web standards are devised, mostly, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). When applied to HTML and CSS, they derive their benefit by enabling the management of content and presentation separately - meaning the message is not the medium. This is the key.

Instead of each web page operating as its own entity, CSS is used to contain all design attributes, while HTML is used strictly for content (CSS is further defined by W3C). So if you need to make a change - to the site's layout, color palette, or fonts for example - you can do it in one file, the CSS file, rather than coding each page manually. In short, the big benefit comes from making information more accessible and format less restrictive.

There are other benefits to employing web standards. According to MACCAWS, a nonprofit group dedicated to making web standards 100% commercially accepted, standards-compliant sites also provide...

Greater accessibility
You can increase readership - and your potential customer-base - with web standards because they incorporate and support accessibility compliance for those with sight impairment.

Faster page loads
The brevity and clarity of standards-compliant code lower the file size of web pages (also called page weight) and improve the user's experience.

Better search engine identification
Implementing web standards increases search results by separating content and code, so search engine "bots" or "spiders" find keywords more easily.

Lower bandwidth usage
Using modern, standards-based design methods can reduce the weight of a site by 25% to 50%, and if you're paying for bandwidth, this can save you money.

Room to grow
Standards-compliance is a sound and sensible way to invest in web development projects with room to grow and adapt to future needs.

More flexibility in selecting a vendor or web staff
With a standards-compliant site, any web author or vendor with access to the standards specifications should be able to step in without having to unravel non-standard code introduced by previous authors.

A good example of how Paragraph is implementing web standards to aid brand management is with our recent work for National Philanthropic Trust.

Using Paragraph Publisher, which supports web standards, we've empowered the client to manage their content with existing internal resources. The organization's site provides the freedom to continually target a message to a variety of audiences, including donors, advisors, financial institutions, and nonprofits.

By separating content and presentation, we can also update visuals without disrupting the content, which paid dividends during the site's development. That's good news for NPT - and for you. Because now you can use technology to save both time and money . without sacrificing one for the other.

If you'd like to learn more about web standards, visit:
www.webstandards.org
www.w3c.org
www.maccaws.org

Or call Paragraph at 215-629-3550.