For true online professionals these days, this point is obvious. We all know and support and promote standards compliance in our websites and in our best practices. We know the benefits, in savings over time, in increased accessibility of content, of being looked upon more fondly by the various search engines, and so on. But do we really know -- and can we really show -- the true measure of just how much standards compliance matters?

I bet not. Today, I'm going to show you some numbers that may help you convince that next disinterested client that his or her website needs -- lest it be doomed to failure -- to be made standards compliant.

What are the standards I'm talking about?

The standards under discussion here are the ones that make up all of the behind-the-scenes substance of your web pages. At the basic level these include the XHTML markup language (which is the latest HTML standard), CSS for stylesheets, and even Javascript is a standard too. At the next level they encompass best practices for each of these standards.

Best practices means things like no partial or broken syntax, using the proper XHTML tags based on their meaning and letting the CSS do the job of styling your web pages. Best practices also mean following guidelines to ensure you haven't done anything to limit who can view your page. A common example of this is providing alternate text for any photos and images on a page, so that visually impaired people browsing with screen readers can still get a description of the images. Let's get on to some number crunching.

The Internet as a whole

Let's start with a sense of just how vast the potential market is online. According to Internet World Stats, there are over one billion people online, at a growth rate of over 200% since the start of this millennium. In North America, roughly 70% of people are online, over 232 million. And in terms of growth percentages, North America is in dead last of all the regions of the world. So while we have the largest percentage online, the rest of the world is catching up fast.

In a nutshell, the Internet is huge and has huge potential for just about any company.

Accessibility

According to the American Foundation for the Blind, there are approximately 10 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States. That's about 4% of Americans who would have special requirements in order to use a computer and access your website, and that's for visual impairment alone.

If you're not standards compliant, you've just potentially refused entry to 4 out of every 100 visitors to your website.

As Joe Clark wrote in his book Building Accessible Websites: "Accessibility is about accommodating minorities. So of course it serves small numbers - in each individual group. Add the groups up and suddenly the numbers aren't so small. But be mindful of the real people hiding behind small percentages. So-called minorities have a way of expanding as your site does: If 1% of your audience can't see graphics, and all of a sudden your site becomes popular and moves from 20,000 hits a month to two million, does the change from 200 to 20,000 affected users influence your opinion that "too few people" might benefit? Even with 200 affected users, can you justify ignoring the inexpensive basic accessibility advice in this book?"

Browser usage

So 4 out of every 100 visitors is now being turned away, assuming you're not already up on standards and accessibility. Let's look at another major side of things: web browsers.

The dominant web browser these days is Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), which for many years counted all but a slim minority of the Internet's population as its users. This created a trend in web design companies to get lazy and simply design for IE, ignoring other browsers and not bothering to verify how your business is being presented to users of the alternative browsers. It's bad enough that this act completely ignores accessibility, but it also cuts you off from additional minority chunks of visitors and makes your website less able to adapt to changes in online trends, such as IE's slow decline in market share over the past couple years.

You see, as of January of 2007, it's a different story for IE. For the first time in many years, its market share has dropped below 80%. That's right, you're now turning away over 20% of your potential visitors if your website was designed for IE only (the most common form of non-standards compliance). That's 1 in every 5 visitors who comes across your website. Not good.

To be fair, alternative browsers such as Firefox (13.67% market share) and Apple's Safari (4.7%) do try their best to cope with bad sites such as these, but they're not perfect at it. However, if your website is designed with Internet standards in mind, then you've done your part to help ALL browsers show your visitors your business as you meant for it to be seen, and you can be more assured of a consistent impression across the board.

Printer AKA researcher friendly

Lots of people use the Internet for research. Their research could be about a product they or their business is interested in buying, or it could be a school project or personal interest they're looking up. As an example of how big online research is, let's look at Wikipedia, the free and user-created encyclopedia website. To date, Wikipedia has reached over 3 million pages of information in almost 250 languages, with tests verifying that the content actually rivals commercial encyclopedias in terms of quality. So a mere volunteers project has created a comprehensive, exhaustive research tool 3 million pages deep. Online research is obviously important to many people.

So is your website researcher friendly? Can people print it out without printing 3 pages of menus and headers before getting to the substance of what they're after? Did you know that with simple standards, any web page can be made consistent in its content layout, and you can have complete control over how it appears on paper too. And it's easy to do.

Make your website printer friendly and that lowly researcher tasked with scoping out which company to buy product X from may just recommend you for making his or her life that much easier.

"Search Engine Optimization"

The hot topic online these days is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the practice of modifying websites to improve their ranking in search engines, primarily Google. This practice has had its fair share of people attempting to fool the system with quick and dirty schemes, but those people usually end up getting caught in the end. For professional SEO specialists though, it all starts with a standards compliant website.

The reason for this is that standards make it easier for Google and gang to make sense of your website, so it gets ranked better and automatically comes up favoured in their eyes (because they make more sense out of what you've given them, so they can better understand where you fit in terms of keywords and topics). That's not to say all you have to do to reach the #1 spot is be standards compliant, but it's a good -- if not essential -- first step.

Google themselves publish in their webmaster guidelines that all you need is clearly written content in a standards compliant format. There are other factors such as having other related websites link to you, but those sorts of things are easier to procure when you've got something good for them to link to in the first place.

Website management software that follows standards and puts you in control of your website's various elements, such as meta tags, page titles and page URLs, can help you take the first few steps to improving your Google rank and consequently to increasing your number of visitors without having to hire an SEO specialist (another win for standards compliance). It also helps you get the most out of a potential SEO specialist, since you've already taken the first few steps on your own.

Standards compliance benefits

Let's look at some of the benefits of standards compliance, in addition to all the bad stuff you avoid by investing the effort into it. Besides not turning away 1 in 5 potential customers, standards compliance can actually save you time and money.

In the short term, standards compliance should be able to save you money because for a qualified web professional, standards compliant websites are actually simpler to build than non-standard ones. They are simpler because the standards are more concise so there is less code (HTML, CSS) to write, and therefore it's faster to write and easier to understand. With almost every non-standards compliant site the HTML code is disorganized and littered with context-specific extras that obstruct readability and understandability of the overall design.

In the long term, standards compliance will again save you money because it's easier to make changes to something simple and organized than to something created ad hoc to just "get it done on time". If the code is hard to understand and hard to read while it's being created, imagine coming back to it to make changes after months or even years away from it. Good luck. Worse still, non-standards compliant HTML almost always permeates to the content level, making it necessary during any sort of website redevelopment or rearchitecting to "clean it up", meaning to go through it piece by piece and remove all of the context-specific garbage found in the content as well. These sorts of endeavours can be very time-consuming and costly and are often impossible to cut down on via automated process.

Another way that standards compliance helps is that since it's more concise, standards compliant websites are smaller and load faster than non-standards compliant ones. This means less wait for visitors, and standards compliant websites will get more visits on the same website setup, all other things being equal.

And finally, just as important as being backwards-compatible (for the same reasons of not wanting to turn away potential visitors) is forward-compatibility. Forward-compatibility is something only standards compliant websites can be assured of. What it means is that you won't get to work one morning only to be told that your website no longer works for anyone who just upgraded to the latest and greatest new web browser (Internet Explorer 7 for example), and so with standards you don't have to worry about fixing such cases. Standards safe-guard against these unexpected (and costly) scenarios.

Standards compliance works

Standards compliance and accessibility are not unfeasible or even expensive goals, provided you choose the tools you use to build your websites with these things in mind. As with most things, it's much cheaper to do it right the first time than to go back and fix it later. So be sure to ask potential software vendors, service providers and consultants what they know about these things and what their products (if applicable) do to help you comply with them. If you don't get straight answers and they seem to be lacking detail, that ought to raise some flags. If they can't answer you, they most likely can't help you either.

The Internet has changed from the days of your favourite nephew creating your website with spinning globes and bevelled text. While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, you get what I mean. The Internet has grown up, the tools of the trade have matured, and your web presence needs to reflect that. But don't think that 1 visitor in 5 will mind if you don't consider these things; they'll just quietly take their business elsewhere.