A point I often bring up is that using standards ensures that anyone can jump in and work on the site (looking forward), the whole future-proofing issue, and my personal favorite thing to do is open up sites in Firefox and strip off all styles (in the web dev toolbar) to show them the squeaky clean informative document that is left behind once the presentation layer is removed. Then I show them the tag soup site that doesn't change much. That always creates an impression.

Hopefully thats helpful.

Joseph R. B. Taylor
Sites by Joe, LLC
http://sitesbyjoe.com
(609)335-3076
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Jay Gilmore wrote:
Christian,

I wholeheartedly agree with you points but I want to go beyond the argument of separation of information and presentation markup.

I am talking about coding using the whole of standards based documents. That portion is an easy sell. I am really talking about form and usage of semantics, logical content markup (SEO is a good argument here). Maybe I am making too much of it and trying to over theorize the issue.

Jay

Jay Gilmore

U)SmashingRed Web & Marketing <http://www.smashingred.com>
B)Jay Gilmore's SmashingRed Blog <http://www.smashingred.com/blog/>
P) 902.529.0651
E) [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



Christian Montoya wrote:

On 2/2/06, Jay Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am looking for a way to make small business owners see that they have now
sane alternative but to use web standards, not tell them they will be ahead
of the curve or save $100/year on hosting.

I'll think of more arguments later, but I can definitely say:

- CSS and seperation of presentation from content makes updating a
site easier, whether it uses a CMS or not. Tag soup CMS solutions are
usually expensive, whereas a typical CSS based site can be built on
top of a free CMS. More importantly, when the site does not run on a
CMS, it really helps to have clean, semantic code without
presentational markup. I know it's a pain for small businesses to pay
someone to update their website all the time (they usually can't
afford to do it in-house), and even if they still pay someone to
update their CSS based site, at least the updates take less time.

- Also, CSS makes it easy to have the site redesigned in the future,
should it ever be necessary, and if someone gives me a CSS site to
redesign, they'll definitely save a lot of money, considering how few
changes I would probably have to make to the markup.

Pretty much any argument that emphasizes lower maintenance cost is key
for small businesses. SEO is a plus.

--
--
Christian Montoya
christianmontoya.com ... rdpdesign.com ... cssliquid.com
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