Professional web folk share plenty of eye-rolling anecdotes about departure from best practice.  It’s one way to let off steam and retain sanity.   I don’t imagine this is unique to web designers and developers — I imagine shoe cobblers had their own, “OMG!” stories.  It was in this fine tradition of mutual “kvetching” that a colleague recently told me about her meeting with a client who shared something about their web site that made her jaw drop.

Apparently for some months, the client’s product image on the home page was completely invisible to site visitors using Internet Explorer.  Now whether you love or hate IE, it doesn’t matter, you wouldn’t want any scenario that resulted in a significant chunk of visitors simply not seeing your primary product image.   What’s more, the client knew about this issue and *shrug* it just hadn’t been addressed.

How could this happen?  Easy.  Somewhere, somehow, someone decided that a “height=auto” attribute could replace an image pixel attribute in the <img> tag representing the client’s flagship product.   Honestly I don’t know where they got that attribute from, but the bottom line is that a completely non-standard code approach was adopted and they let it sit.  The result?  Probably some 50% of the site visitors missed a key marketing element of this client’s home page.

Along similar lines, I was browsing the web site of a local community college and stumbled upon a scheduled event that was presented as an image.  That’s right, date, description, content everything was in a GIF image file.  Aside from the content being opaque to Google, it goes without saying that this approach to content is difficult to update to say the least.  If the graphic designer packs his or her bags… then what?  Perhaps that’s what happened because this site included the text-based annotation, “This event has been rescheduled to February 15.”  True story.

In practice, we naturally bring our best talents to whatever we do.  If we know graphics, then our site will tend to be graphic-heavy and display our talent for top-notch image creation.  If we know programming, then we might rely more strongly on some back-end techniques or in-house custom apps to manage content.  On that engineering-heavy end of things, I’ve seen user interfaces for a CMS so unfriendly that, in fact, the engineers end up maintaining the content.  Both extremes can do a disservice to efficiently creating and managing content.  This is why from a practical point of view we need a CMS that is relatively friendly and that is standards-based.

Clearly then, one huge advantage of putting a CMS into production, whether WordPress, Drupal or other standards-based systems, is that you start with a platform that assumes a best-practice approach to web publishing. Ultimately we want to adopt a tool set that helps us get out of our own way.

Another example?  If you are a web geek like myself, you occasionally peek under the covers at the source code of sites to determine what they are using for content management, or just to see how things are put together.  I performed this exercise recently with a major university web site.  What did I find?  Tables… horrors!  In web years, this approach went by the wayside eons ago.  Yet, so many sites still rely on this methodology for layout.   Cascading stylesheets was supposed to mean the end to using tables for content layout.

Here it is, 2011 and we’re still wondering why so many sites are being developed using these methods.  In case the boss needs convincing as to why time and resources should be invested in making your site standards-based, bear in mind the following concepts and arguments:

1) Standards-based sites utilize CSS and typically employ content databases, both of which serve the chief practical purpose of separating web content from web design.

2) By separating content from design you position your site content to be more Google-friendly.  Adopting a CMS that creates key-word-based URL’s further enhances this position (SEO), and makes subsequent Analytics easier to understand.

3) By putting style and content in their proper places, your site is more easily distributed via RSS subscription, more easily adapted into mobile format, and is typically friendlier to screen reading software in the event that 508 accessibility compliance is a concern.  Also a key point of this standards-based approach: it will be less expensive and easier to redesign the site in the future.  Seems like a win-win-win, right?

It’s hard to measure the cost of obsolescence, or presenting your visitors with a look that is clearly based on yesteryear’s method of web page presentation.  But clearly, adopting the most flexible approach will position you well for whatever changes come along next!