Microformats and Business Websites

Microformats?  First you probably want to know what they are, well the Microformats website describes them as:

[…] a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined. 1

So why is support for Microformats on business websites, such as Manor Solutions, important.  Well, it enables search engines and other websites that index your website’s content to easily identify key details, in the case of Manor Solutions these are contact details and the address of their retail premesis, and present these to the search engine user or use them in services such as Google Places.

It also allows Microfotmat aware browsers to display this information to the visitor and enable them to download contact details into their address book or for mobile browsers contact information becomes interactive and usable at the touch of a screen.

For retail and service business websites we normally mark-up the footer ‘imprint’ to enable support for Microformats and add things such as a twitter link, telephone number, etc to enable any page on the website to let external services and browsers know contact details are available.

If you want to see how it works, just click here to download our vCard and add us to your addressbook – all using Microfotmat data that’s included on our website!