Web standards. Some of you may know exactly what they are and some may have no clue. I like to think of them as a sort of coding practice for any website project. Those of you in the industry have all heard of separation of structure, layout/presentation, and behavior. Most of the time this just means your structure is contained in your (x)html, layout/presentation in your CSS, and your behavior in your javascript.

I am going to list some of the benefits and hopefully anyone from a site owner to a developer can take something from this.

Makes maintenance a breeze

I have worked on too many sites with inline styles or even styles declared in each individual html file and the maintenance is almost NEVER easy. The Find and Replace tool is not perfect so the time it takes to make a site wide change is exponentially larger than if it would have been created with web standards in mind.  This gets especially painful when there is a mess of javascript as well. So to website owners, you could save a lot of money in web maintenance if your site is developed following web standards.

Search Engine

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So many individuals and small businesses out there have taken the plunge into the online world.  In a perfect world once you launched your website your phone would start ringing off the hook with, “We found your company online and would love to do business with you!”.  However we do not live in a perfect world and this does not happen as often as we all would like.  So this post is to get some of you up to speed with some simple SEO tips that you can apply to your own sites to get a little more traffic, generate a few more leads, and ultimately a few more sales for you businesses.

1. Get listed as a business in the major search engines – Google Maps Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, MSN Local Listing Center
2. Write meaningful page titles – This is actually high under-utilized.  I see too many sites’ page titles that read “<insert company name here>” and that’s it.  This is the perfect place to take advantage of geographic and keyword targeting.  For example CWS wants to appeal to the entire Lehigh Valley for web design

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When working with some of our more recent clients they expressed that they liked their logo to function as a link back to their home page. We had done this in the past but not always in the most SEO-friendly manner. After doing some googling I found a great tutorial to accomplish just this.

Create SEO friendly Text Images Headers from Tutorial Dog