There is a lot more to building a website than just making it look good and run quickly. Two websites which look and feel the same could have been built in two entirely different ways, one being highly standards compliant and the other not.
There are a number of different website programming 'standards' and your website should be constructed to meet the appropriate ones for your business. Having a website professionally built does not automatically mean that it will be standards compliant, it is down to the way the programmer constructs the website that determines what standards (if any) it meets. This is why it is important to select a programmer who understands and adheres to standards compliancy as a matter of course.
The most common set of standards are the international W3C standards, and as a minimum we program our websites to the W3C AA standard. We also program our websites to meet the UK DDA accessibility standard which by law all UK websites should comply to, though in fact very few actually do.
By meeting these standards not only is the website meeting its legal obligations, it's opening it up to a wider audience by being readable by those with visual impairments. Standards compliancy can also help greatly with search engine ranking.
