Lorelle wrote a post a few days ago asking the question, Do you remember your first blog post?. The answer to that is easy. It’s ‘no’. I started out using Blogger to publish on my own domain and the remnants of that are, I think, gone. But I have trawled back through my oldest surviving blog and found the oldest surviving post. Here it is from May 2005
I find it interesting to see how companies naturally move from one set of technologies to new, emerging technologies
The way the web, and web standards is taken up is particularly interesting as, unlike operating systems, and hardware, the company is likely to be generally unaware of the methods used to create their site; for example, a company, or at least its IT department will select the OS for their needs. Larger companies are unlikely to switch to a brand new operating system as and when it emerges, making the trade off between known reliability and productivity versus a more volatile potential for both loss and gain
Where web standards comes in there are advantages: quicker development time, site wide style decisions and changes, browser and future browser compatibility, loading time, search engine preference and more. The question is then, why are websites being built with technology that does not display these advantages?
I looked at the websites of 99 of the top 105 companies in the UK (top 105 companies by market capitalisation listed on the London Stock Exchange). 11% of the websites could be successfully validated with the W3C; many of the others contained non-standard characters and did not contain a doc-type declaration. 20% of the sites were using a table-less layout
The key points of this, in my opinion, are firstly that the use of web standards to most companies is of no relevance; the site either works or it doesn’t. It is likely therefore to be reflective of the take up of standards in design community as a whole, or a sign that companies that do not specialise in web design are offering it as part of a larger service.
Are larger companies more likely to make use of communications experts that design websites, instead of web design firms? Do they make use of larger firms for whom changing methodologies would become un-economic in the short term or do they have in-house web services who aren’t provided the budged to change something that already words? All of these are possibilities; of course one minor survey on its own is not conclusive, perhaps by carrying out the same survey over a number of years a better picture may be drawn up, in the meantime I will have to continue to do my part.