Internet Marketing Blog

Web Standards has been a term often heard by web professionals over the past decade and it seems that this has been a good thing for increasing the professionalism of our industry. But often the client has been left out of the loop on why web standards are important and not only that but can benefit them and their ROI.

The advantages for web designers are perfectly clear in that the first thing a designer or developer will notice when adopting web standards is that their code is:

• Easier to read
• Less bloated
• Much easier to bug fix

The first and third of these are directly related and provide the client with the benefit that maintenance costs should be trimmed as bug fixing becomes quicker. However, the second point in this list also provides a number of benefits to the client.

Lets look at these benfits in detail.

Firstly, with less bloated code comes smaller file sizes which equates to less bandwidth used by your site which can save some of the operating costs of your site.

Secondly, this smaller file size then equates to faster page loads which is highly beneficial as there have been many studies over the years that suggest that users are not prepared to wait too long for a site to load before finding somewhere else to go (how long is too long is a contentious point).

Lastly, though is an important benefit for many of our clients who use our Search Engine Marketing services to market their site and attain good traffic through Google. This benefit is that since April 2008 Google Adwords account users landing page load times have been taken into account when judging the quality of the page so quicker load times can directly benefit your Google campaign: How does load time affect my landing page quality?

Using standards is also good from the point of view that the code will then be future proofed against advances in web technologies such as new browser launches etc. As the new Google Chrome browser is a a standards compliant browser we are not having to recode to make any of our sites work in it, they work in it anyway due to being standards compliant.

Standards compliance is not as big a topic these days as it used to be but it is still worth reminding clients that there are benefits to adhering to the standards.

Every now and then you have one of those little problems, you are sure there must be a simple solution, yet for the life of you – you can’t find it.

Today I had the task of converting a few hundred supplied images into a useable format for web use. The supplied files were produced on a mac, and were free of defining extensions.
We Windows users do tend to find file extensions useful as do many online and offline applications.

Martin, our Senior Designer, who is recovering swiftly from allowing his 2 year old daughter to shave his head, managed to work out that the correct extension for these files would be a .tiff – (Tag Image File Format), having tried .eps , .bmp, .jpg and a few others.

I looked into the options available – those of you who have tried the Windows rename tool will understand that this was not the best way to proceed.

Initially I looked at Microsoft Picture Editor which, though not a great editor, has a very useful file renaming routine. The program, however, did not recognise the files I pointed it at as image files ( as they had no extensions ) – so refused to have anything to do with them. Next I researched several downloadable programs which promised to batch rename files, but had no real luck.

Ah, the joy of the Internet ( only last week I fixed my washing machine following advice on a forum), I found mention of a command line rename tool which I could use directly from Windows Vista. It recommended me to try opening up command line in the folder ( shift and right click ) I wished to edit :

ren *.* *.tiff

You can of course change the last bit to be anything.

As if by magic all files in the folder were immediately and swiftly renamed with the chosen extension.

Now that the files are viewable and editable Martin is batching them into .jpegs.