Tell your clients why web standards should matter to them
Written June 20, 2009. 8 comments.
You and I both know the importance of web standards, but what about your clients? If you were to ask if a web standards compliant web site is important to them, you’ll probably be met with a stare not too dissimilar to a deer in headlights.
In all likelihood your client doesn’t know what web standards are, or they have a grossly uninformed interpretation. One of my clients once said very matter-of-fact “it’s making the design look a certain way”. Kudos for trying. But guesses like that personify the standard interpretation of what clients think web standards are – that it has something to do with how the web site looks.
Given they aren’t in the web design business, it would be unfair to criticise them for such a grossly wrong answer. I firmly believe that designers have a sworn duty to educate their clients of why web standards should be an important factor to them. In order to do that though you have to show them the money saving benefits – not the development benefits (although there are plenty of them too). Here’s how.
- Making the site available to multiple browsers on different operating systems and even portable devices, you are maximising the potential customer base.
- You are future proofing your site and reducing the need for another redesign later on.
- Standards based sites typically have a smaller code footprint, which means faster loading, which means a better user experience.
- Standards based sites have semantic order, which translates into higher search engine indexing.
- By conforming to an already established strict set of development rules, your web designer (or anyone who follows web standards) will be able to implement changes far quicker than on a site that doesn’t conform to standards.
As you can see all of these reasons translate into monetary benefits.
The term ‘web standards’ can have negative connotations associated with it to those outside the industry. ‘Standards’ can easily be interpreted as ‘limited’, so you’ll need to emphasise that conforming to web standards has absolutely nothing to do with how the web site design looks and nothing to do with how users interact with it. It’s about how the design is put together ‘under the hood’ – for lack of a better metaphor – that will help enforce the four points listed earlier.
This should put their mind at ease, just in case.
Start of pageWho is That Web Guy?
Michael is a veteran web designer / developer / usability evangelist, practitioner of W3C guidelines, and currently head of the web dev unit at Stormbox, a branding and creative communications agency located in Perth, Western Australia.
There are some more potentially if you push the standards far enough, such as semantic web opportunities, but essentially those are harder to sell and sometimes may not be as relevant as the ones you have mentioned.
You see, here, in Bosnia, for my client it’s more important for web to have as many as possible things on the web in one page if possible, then having a quality breakfast. You can’t even try to talk to them. They know it best and there is no room for discussion… *sigh*