Hi,
It occurs to me that a way of marketing web standards is in fear of not being seen.
There is a big boom in mobile and handheld computing and access to the net, and it seems to be gathering pace. Keeping to standards allows such devices (and anything else that may come along) to access pages without mangling them (too much).
At the moment many sites look a total mess on my Palm computer and completely unreadable on a mobile. I often waste time cleaning up pages so that I can read them at my leisure on my Palm. Other people would just not bother, but what can I say, I'm both obsessive and lazy.
I now spend more time reading my Palm than reading paper-based books or my desktop screen. I spend more overall time on my desktop, but that is mostly programming and writing -- the Palm is still a bit inconvenient for that.
Best wishes,
- Miriam
(waves - hi Bob :)
Wong Chin Shin wrote:
Hi,
In Singapore, "web design" as a profession has gotten a bad rep over the
past few years. The barriers to entry aren't exactly high and the fact is as
long as someone has a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, (ye gods) Frontpage,
Photoshop and a half-assed grasp of how to use them would be able to thrash
out something that's acceptable to clients.
Myself, I grew disillusioned with the rates and limits on creativity that we were getting about 3 years ago. Imagine your employer offering a template-based website to multiple clients at S$500 for 10 pages and you get a pretty good idea of the lengths you have to go to so that the budget isn't broken. My then-employer didn't value creative personnel highly either so he refused to employ a graphics designer and for a long time, I had to outsource design work at cutthroat prices for a single PSD template document. Needless to say, I'm not proud of my work from that period and I actively avoided doing websites for a while.
After a 2 year hiatus, I am honestly feeling good about "web design" again.
Separating content and layout made perfect sense to me as a programmer.
XML/XSLT is good 'cos it allows me to modularize sections of a site without
having to resort to server-side technologies. CSS is great, just great. But
the best thing for me so far, is that after looking through most of the
major corporate and government websites in Singapore and the South East Asia
region, nobody's doing it yet. That's right, we're far away from standards
utopia as yet but where there's room for change, there's money to be made in
my book.
I've been spending the past half year learning up on standards-compliance but one thing still stands out: how to market it. In US and Australia, there're a growing number of web design outfits using compliance as a marketing tool. They include:
1) http://www.stopdesign.com 2) http://www.simplebits.com/ 3) http://pixelplain.com/
Problem is though that when I read through the literature on those sites, it
seems that they might appeal to MIS managers who have an eye on bandwidth
costs but to a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) owner? Bandwidth
would have nearly no bearing on their decision as they would hardly go
beyond the allocated bandwidth of a cheap hosting package. Neither would
accessibility unless you're selling Braille e-books. To this breed of
decision makers, IE *IS* the web so telling them you intend to fix this
would brand yourself in the same category as a "Linux-zealot hippie" almost
immediately (not that I'm not, but I'm having my marketing cap on right
now).
So, I would like to solicit some feedback on how exactly would you market a standards-compliant approach to website design. My take on this:
1) Choose the right firms to sell it to. SMEs may not be the right people
'cos accessibility and HTML download sizes are not a priority. Government
and major retail sites would be good.
2) Choose the right person in the target client to sell it to. A general
manager would not bother with background technologies as much as an MIS
manager. 3) Judicious use of catch-phrases. I love Firefox, I really do, but I would
be wary of dropping the name on a potential client as the last thing they
need is the impression that they need to install yet another software. I
already have problems getting graphic designers to install it. Thanks to the
mass media however, the words "XML-compliant" has much better connotations.
4) Hard data. For practice, I've been taking major content-based websites
such as the local paper and re-implementing it using CSS/XSLT. If I can get
my foot in the door and do a presentation, imagine the impression I could
make if I show them their home page and how big it is right now and then
show them my optimized version (identical pixel for pixel) and the 70%
savings in download sizes that it yields. THEN, I show them how I can change
the entire layout just by changing the CSS file. You get the idea.
Challenges:
The main challenge is that the whole process may seem like it's much ado
about nothing visually. Nobody was kidding when the phrase "a picture is
worth a thousand words" was coined. No matter how the HTML is optimized, the
visual layout is still the same. If your potential client doesn't care about
anything else, you're barking at a wall.
Feedback please: 1) Designers, how would YOU approach selling this concept? Or would you? 2) Managers, what would catch YOUR attention in a pitch geared towards this?
Just airing some thoughts and trying to get some feedback. I hope it's not off-topic.
Thanks! Wong
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