And should you care?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops and oversees standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.
Because the Web beautifully facilitates human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge, one of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to everyone, “whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.”
Basically, W3C develops coding guidelines to ensure high technical and editorial quality of websites. Compliance with these standards is, at the most basic level, just good practice.
If you need more convincing, it may even have SEO benefits in the form of increased backlinks and traffic - especially if you have a site that was build a few years ago.
Further, because of the sheer number of browsers and platforms available to web users now, maintaining different code is no longer an affordable option. It’s much more cost-effective to just use standards-compliant markup on your site, instead of relying on patches.
So, what now? If you’re building a new site, the ideal solution is to have it designed in compliance to begin with.
If you already have a website, you either can hire a designer familiar with the W3C standards to redo it, or steel yourself for a sizeable learning curve.
That said, the great news is there are many simple, fast, and inexpensive things you can do to bring your site in line with standards - and even make it less costly to maintain.
Get started with the official W3C markup validation service, at http://validator.w3.org.
Kristina Smith is an Associate Writer with Single Entry Point Marketing. She brings 9 years of experience in online marketing, brand building, and copywriting, specializing in the advertising, publishing, and travel industries. She spends her free time 
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