When I pitch for a site I don't talk about web standards and accessibility per se - these are just methodologies I use to deliver results. Web standards and accessibility are invisible to the untrained eye.
In my experience clients generally talk about the site working in this browser and that browser as part of their requirements. I take this and guide the conversation towards meeting published standards independent of specific browser technology, ranking well in search engines (using design methods, not SEO), and a having a lower total cost of ownership.
The skill is, as with any sales, to speak to the clients desires - push those buttons that turns your client on. The psychology of decision making is that it is an emotional process which is then rationalized with the 'facts'.
So if you're pitching to, say, a fashion designer, then using flash (stereotypically the antithesis of accessibility and googleness) could well be the best tool to use for content delivery. [Use flash satay to make it accessible].
The biggest challenge designers face when pitching is how to preserve the value of design in an industry that promises one click professional publishing (yes, I'm looking at you dreamweaver, and dtp in general) in a market that is easy to enter but hard to master. How do you articulate what good design actually is when it is sometimes hard to distinguish from bad design? Good design often just works better, or looks better on a perceptual level and it's hard to pinpoint the 'why?'.
I think basing a sales pitch on a specific browser is a huge mistake, as is skewing a design to work with a browsers strengths in a specific climate at a specific point of time -- it runs counter to my view of what web standards are about.
Right now, getting things to work in IE is really the only area of designing with web standards that runs the risk of blowing out a design budget, but with experience this browsers quirks can generally be avoided/minimized...
So you really need to tell the story of why your 'expensive' design is so much better than you competitors cheap design when, with practice, the methodology for producing a standards design is arguably the same as a non-standards design.
Terrence Wood.
On 2004-11-25 10:25 PM, Kristof Rutten wrote:
Hi All,
I don't know if you guys experience the same anoying and frustrating talks
when it comes
to convince a prospect/client of the fact his/her site isn't working for
most of the world.
-- The fact that it's not build following certain standards, the fact
Google is like a blind, numb en deaf
person and so on. Finally you have the guy convinced, in comes the next
frontpage cowboy.
He lowers the price, the target, the standards .. and up up and away, there
goes another client.
How do you convince your client to spend a little more on the design, the
coding and the usability
when the most simple logic doesn't work ? Do you have the same feeling most people don't care about all of the above
and keep running around with the idea IE will fix all.
Prospects site: http://www.s2store.be <BLOCKED::http://www.s2store.be> Frontpage cowboys: http://www.xperienz.be <BLOCKED::http://www.xperienz.be>
The prospect is complaining about the fact his site doesn't show up in
Google and zhy all of his competitors
do. The Google results : http://www.google.be/search?q=site:s2store.be
<BLOCKED::http://www.google.be/search?q=site:s2store.be&hl=nl&lr=&start=20&s
a=N> &hl=nl&lr=&start=20&sa=N
Remarks, ideas - toughts ? .K
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