What are web standards?
Most people are surprised to learn that there are web standards; after all you can put pretty much anything that you want on the web. The standards have been created in order to help standardize things on the web so that sites will work properly no matter where you view them. This is just one of the many benefits of sticking to the standards.
Web standards are simply a set of standards that have been set in the way that websites should be designed. Strictly speaking these are not standards but only recommendations; you can build a website that does not comply with them. However there are a lot of benefits to making sure that your site does meet the standards. It is therefore a good idea to pay attention to them when you are designing your site. The standards are mainly focused on the way that the code is written.
The main reason that the web standards exist is to make sure that sites work properly on all browsers and screens. This has been a major issue in web design almost from the start; sites that work well in one browser don't work at all in another one. The standards exist to help alleviate these problems. If your sites is coded in accordance with the web standards it should work on all browsers and screens. This is becoming more and more important as the number of different ways that you can access the internet increases. Designing sites that will work on a smart phone as well as computer would be impossible otherwise.
The other big reason that you want to make sure that you stick to the web standards is that it will make it easier for the search engines to index your site. By having all sites use the same standards it is easier for the search engines to design an algorithm that will allow them to determine what your site is about since they will all be laid out in the same way. The result is that if your site follows the standards it is much more likely that your site will rank well in the search results.
One last reason that web standards exist is to encourage the use of cascading style sheets or CSS. The reason for this is that it means that the design code is attached to the site rather than being embedded in it. The result is that pages will load faster and require less bandwidth. This is good for the people who visit the sites as well as for the owners of the sites. Using less bandwidth makes it cheaper to host the site. Sticking to standards will make visiting your site a better experience for people and make it much more likely that they will come back.