We’ve been working on a new website for Couch Cases, and the process got me thinking about web design as it relates to video projects. Genius Monkeys was created to give our customers the ability to exploit the new opportunities where video and new media converge. And part of that mission involves website design and development.

By the way, our sister company, Empty Street Productions, handles a lot of our heavy lifting when it comes to website development. Empty Street has been around for over 14 years now, and has built websites for clients ranging from small startups like Netscape (remember them?) to huge multinational companies like IBM and Motorola. They know what they’re doing.

Back to planning a website. It’s not enough to have a slick-looking design. When I started Genius Monkeys, I issued a mandate- the websites we design and build must meet web standards as much as possible.

A lot of our clients don’t initially understand the importance of developing a website that follows web standards. Websites that implement web standards tend to cost a bit more than “old-fashioned” websites  upfront. So why spend the extra money on them? It turns out that there’s plenty of good reasons to do so: 

• They make it easier to add to your website as time goes by
• Search engines love them
• Separating design from content using CSS allows you to make huge changes to your website with a minimum of hassle
• A website built with web standards in mind tends to display better on iPhones and other new web-enabled devices 
• Most importantly, the majority of web users will be able to view and use your website

Most web design companies do not design for web standards. Their reasoning tends to be along the lines of “my customers won’t pay for it”. And it is true that learning to build web standards solutions requires a web design company to completely rethink how they approach a web design project. It’s a whole new way of working, and it requires a huge amount of discipline.

Generally speaking, web designers who only work in “visual” view- who are used to dragging and dropping items around when they build a website- are unable to create websites that follow web standards. To create a web standards website, you need to be sort of like Neo in The Matrix. You need to be able to “see” the code and how it will appear once it is deployed.

And that’s a tough job, but a very rewarding one.