The voices are telling me Marilyn Langfeld said on 12/29/2004 6:44 AM:
I wanted to add that I've had success with small businesses by describing how easily their sites can be redesigned using CSS (show them CSS Zen Garden). If they've already gone through a redesign, they've been impressed. If not, and they are fearful of making mistakes with the first go, their fears can be alleviated. That, added to SEO optimization, works better than describing band width issues, for me.
One of advertising's old saws is "sell the sizzle, not the steak." Knock them out visually, then show them usability and logical information architecture, and finally hit them with some of the extras you throw in for free (like low bandwidth, accessibility, cheap uability on any device -- hiya right back, Miriam ;-)
Speaking of that, let's be careful to specify what we're selling and what we aren't. There's usability on cell phones and Palms that results from a full-bore multi-media development with exhaustive testing on a roomful of devices. And then there's usability on multiple devices that just sorta shows up when you avoid doing stupid things. The latter we can sell cheaply. The former costs an arm and a leg.
In fact I'm starting to get worried about the whole issue of "if I mention it, what do I have to deliver so that the customer buys off on it?"
On another tack, if you've really got brass galumpkes, you could try a number like this:
"So, did you ever have a site get so 'mature' that you pretty much had to throw the whole thing out?"
"Wanna do it again?"
"So what are you doing differently this time to make sure that doesn't happen? Hmmmmm?"
Btw, I just got to the XSLT discussion today, right after I finished doing some. You're welcome to examine, steal, criticize or whatever: <url:http://www.crispen.org/sync/rr-bookmarks.php>. You can see the XSLT and PHP from links on the page, and because some folks on another list had asked about it, I actually commented it. Perhaps even correctly. ;-) -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/
What we're looking for: destinations. What we end up getting: journeys.
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
