Website standards

Website standards

By making sure your site follows 'best practice' standards, you stand a better chance of superb usability across different users. Standards also ensure that search engines can see all of your site's content and give you better ranking results.

That's why we take care to use what's known as 'valid code' - in other words following the standards that we identify through our daily monitoring of what constitutes best practice.

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) compliance

W3C is the place that publishes a great deal of 'best practice' guidance, including things that affect search engine optimisation. By adhering to these standards, we ensure that your website has excellent compatibility with the widest range of software and hardware.

Doublespark is also able to produce websites that conform to all the relevant accessibility guidelines. There is increasing regulatory and social pressure to ensure that websites are accessible to people with disabilities for example.

We can guide you on W3C's WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) - a set of 65 technical criteria that can be used to assess the accessibility of a website. There are 16 Priority 1 criteria that 'must' be met if certain identified groups are to access information. Two further levels cover criteria that 'should' be met or 'may' be met.

For existing sites, we carry out website accessibility testing, as well as recommend and address areas for improvement. The new sites we build can have compliance with the priority levels of your choice right from the start.

Achieving positive financial returns

With the ever-growing amount of transactions in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business sectors, we are confident that most companies will find installing an e-commerce solution pays for itself. The benefits come not just from increased sales, but also from the efficiency of automatic order processing.

However, as many of our customers are starting e-commerce for the first time, any project we embark on starts with an assessment of what returns are possible so you can properly assess whether and how much to invest in the solution. Based on that analysis, we can suggest any one of a number of solutions depending on your budget and likely returns. Each solution is scalable, so you can invest more once you start to get initial sales from the system.

Gaining more from e-commerce

The chances are that adding e-commerce functionality will start to improve sales and profits. But it important that the overall usability of your site is excellent so that customers have a pleasant experience all the way through to completing their purchase. Good site navigation, fast download speeds and detailed product content all contribute to good 'browse-to-buy' ratios.

Doublespark is therefore able to take a holistic approach to e-commerce. We can help you take both a strategic and operational view of the situation and do what's required to turn your site into a competitive online store. This approach can really help you make the most of the exciting opportunities that the internet offers.