Selling Standards

Note: This post is over a year and a half old. You may want to check later in this blog to see if there is new information.

The following links are auto-generated but may help you locate newer content:

I think that web designers (myself included) spend too much time trying to sell our obsession with standards to our clients. The fact of the matter is that clients don’t care whether or not a page validates. As web designers and developers trying to sell standards, we need to concentrate on things that our clients actually care about. Things like the speed of their site and, of course, the cost. Valid pages almost always mean lighter weight code, and if standards can speed development time and reduce maintenance time, it means savings for the client in the long run. Paraphrasing Ethan Marcotte, the Web Standards project notes…

Looking back on last year, Ethan noticed about 15% of his work time was spent working around invalid code. With that discovery, he came to the conclusion that [i]nvalid sites may look the same as those built on a foundation of valid, well-formed code, but in my experience, they invariably cost more to maintain. That may seem obvious to you, but he argues that it is not typically a feature we sell to our clients as part of that standards package.

From: Another way to look at validation - The Web Standards Project

Forget about accessibility and validity when talking to clients. Talk to them about money, about speed, and about providing a pleasant experience for all users on all platforms. I like to show a client the difference in the code between a table based design loaded with javascript menus and a lightweight, valid XHTML design using unobtrusive, external javascript. It’s not meant to bamboozle them, I feel it’s an honest way to show even an untrained eye the mess that I can save them. It’s apparent, even to a layman, that the code involved in the former would take much more work to update than the latter. And that can sell standards to a client.