Small business owners satisfied with the look of their commercial website may be in for a surprise, soon. Some designers have ignored advice from the Worldwide Web Consortium, W3C, the international authority establishing standards for code to create web sites. There are new reasons to reconsider the W3C recommendations.
Browser companies choose what they will support within the W3C standards, and most try to fully comply. Your pages may continue looking okay for years to come because most browsers will support your code no matter what W3C recommends. The impact on search engines may be the real issue, however, and could be more serious in 2 years, or less.
What’s expected to happen? The search engine wars are a constant battle of changing the math algorithms to list search results. Too often the results are loaded up front with nonsensical or unrelated sites because of creative designers who get high ranking with remotely related sites, plus a ton of phone directory lists, or other paid listings near the top. The value to the person using the search engine is diminished, and this trend has not been overlooked by the major search engines. They each...