How to sell standards to a small client
September 20, 2003 |
View Comments (3) |
Category:
Web Business
Summary: Is it really important to sell standards to a client or can you just develop a standards compliant site without them knowing?
Jeffrey Veen has written a great article on the business value of standards design. It is hard to argue with any of his points and I am sure most MIS Managers, CIOs, and Network Engineers will love the fact that bandwidth can reduce costs. In today's economy the best way to increase profits is not by increasing revenue, but by decreasing costs. But what do you do if you are small time developer trying to sell standards to the local business? Well first off you do not try to sell them web standards.
Most small businesses get on the web mainly so that they can have a presence. They could not care less about the amount of bandwidth that is used up because they only pay $10/month for hosting with bandwidth allocation up to 3 gigs. Nothing on their site is dynamic and there are no large images or pdfs that need to be downloaded. Basically it is a simple brochureware site or a business type blog. There is a good chance they will not even understand what bandwidth is anyways.
What you need to do is take responsibilty and give them their money's worth by building a standards compliant site anyways. Maybe they do not care if their site follows standards or not, but you as a designer should. Your client wants a nice clean layout that promotes their business then you should proceed and develop that site for them. Just make sure to use standards. If you do a good job you might have some repeat business. Why go through the hassle of having to mangle through YOUR own bad code later?
I have not met a person who was able to win a project by telling the person they will build them a standards site. To most that means nothing. Most of the people who look for others to build their sites probably think that all websites are built with standards anyways. You can sell standards, but you also need to sell other virtues of your business. I do not think that standards alone can make a sale for a small company.
Standards opens up more windows for your clients. It can be cool to show them their website on a PDA and say "hey you didn't even have to pay for that". Think they will like that? You as a designer already know the benefits of web standards. That is what is most important.
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Comments
#1
still undefined URL, btw...
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Selling standards to a client is pretty useless, usually. They don't care what the code looks like. To them, what they see is the website, and whether you use tables or not, or even (heaven forfend) use font tags instead of CSS formatting doesn't matter in the slightest.
As for the PDA, while it has some cool factor, that's crushed when they try looking at your nice new tableless site in Netscape 4.7 and everything's smooshed together in one big block, or it's a plain white page with divs divided by HRs (one of these days I need to figure out how to do that second thing).
If your client and his customers are going to be using old browsers, build them a site that'll work in them. As you said before... HTML 4.0 (and for that matter, 3.0, 2.0, and the original spec) is a standard, too... and an HTML 3 compliant page is going to look perfectly fine in any reasonable browser you open it in, including Netscape 4. You might not get the geek cred for cool tableless design, but your client sells more widgets... and what looks better on your portfolio? "Utilized standards-based tableless design. Site currently under redesign by new developer" or "Used backwards-compatible code, client profits increased 15% as a result of new web-based widget catalog"
It's a measure of risk vs reward. In some places, it's worth the risk to go all out with tableless positioning and so on. In some places, it's safer to stick with tables but use CSS for the formatting. Not a small client, but a good example -- I helped design and maintain several websites for my primary job. One is the primary site for the business... tables and CSS formatting. One is aimed solely at college students (and prospective ones) - currently it's straight HTML with tables, I recently stripped all the font tags and legacy golive code out of it and replaced it with CSS formatting and some cleaner code for the rollovers, and we're goign to redesign it when we get time, using tableless design and maybe playing with XSL some more, and maybe even throw in a little flash. But it's a low-risk site, only a couple thousand pageviews a month (the primary site gets about 100 times as many), and it's targeted at students who usually have newer computers and up-to-date browsers (in our server logs for that site, WinXP actually outdoes Win98). And we've studied a year's worth of logs to determine the risk factor involved.
Then there's the online banking site. That uses CSS for formatting, except for crucial things like font color red for debits and warnings and so forth. It works perfectly fine with CSS turned off, it's just a little ugly. We do have our limits though. WebTV is *not* supported. If it works, more power to you, but we don't suggest it.
Anyway, I suppose I'm mostly agreeing with you, but with the caveat that "standards compliance != tableless design" and that if you DO risk your client's site using tableless design, you'd better be prepared to change it, pronto, if he complains.
Or have an entire second version that uses tables. Sounds like overkill, but if you are already storing the content in a database and dumping it to a template dynamically, it's not going to kill you to take another 15 minutes once your design is done and recreate it as well as you can with tables and have a second template for people using the old one... (display:none on a "if this site looks odd, you're probably using an old browser. Click here to view a version tailored for your decrepit software)
#3
I have some clients coming up who are going to have some standard compliant websites. All I had to do was show them my previous work and not worry about telling them anything about "standards".
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#1
still undefined URL, btw...
--
Selling standards to a client is pretty useless, usually. They don't care what the code looks like. To them, what they see is the website, and whether you use tables or not, or even (heaven forfend) use font tags instead of CSS formatting doesn't matter in the slightest.
As for the PDA, while it has some cool factor, that's crushed when they try looking at your nice new tableless site in Netscape 4.7 and everything's smooshed together in one big block, or it's a plain white page with divs divided by HRs (one of these days I need to figure out how to do that second thing).
If your client and his customers are going to be using old browsers, build them a site that'll work in them. As you said before... HTML 4.0 (and for that matter, 3.0, 2.0, and the original spec) is a standard, too... and an HTML 3 compliant page is going to look perfectly fine in any reasonable browser you open it in, including Netscape 4. You might not get the geek cred for cool tableless design, but your client sells more widgets... and what looks better on your portfolio? "Utilized standards-based tableless design. Site currently under redesign by new developer" or "Used backwards-compatible code, client profits increased 15% as a result of new web-based widget catalog"
It's a measure of risk vs reward. In some places, it's worth the risk to go all out with tableless positioning and so on. In some places, it's safer to stick with tables but use CSS for the formatting. Not a small client, but a good example -- I helped design and maintain several websites for my primary job. One is the primary site for the business... tables and CSS formatting. One is aimed solely at college students (and prospective ones) - currently it's straight HTML with tables, I recently stripped all the font tags and legacy golive code out of it and replaced it with CSS formatting and some cleaner code for the rollovers, and we're goign to redesign it when we get time, using tableless design and maybe playing with XSL some more, and maybe even throw in a little flash. But it's a low-risk site, only a couple thousand pageviews a month (the primary site gets about 100 times as many), and it's targeted at students who usually have newer computers and up-to-date browsers (in our server logs for that site, WinXP actually outdoes Win98). And we've studied a year's worth of logs to determine the risk factor involved.
Then there's the online banking site. That uses CSS for formatting, except for crucial things like font color red for debits and warnings and so forth. It works perfectly fine with CSS turned off, it's just a little ugly. We do have our limits though. WebTV is *not* supported. If it works, more power to you, but we don't suggest it.
Anyway, I suppose I'm mostly agreeing with you, but with the caveat that "standards compliance != tableless design" and that if you DO risk your client's site using tableless design, you'd better be prepared to change it, pronto, if he complains.
Or have an entire second version that uses tables. Sounds like overkill, but if you are already storing the content in a database and dumping it to a template dynamically, it's not going to kill you to take another 15 minutes once your design is done and recreate it as well as you can with tables and have a second template for people using the old one... (display:none on a "if this site looks odd, you're probably using an old browser. Click here to view a version tailored for your decrepit software)
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)