Steve Green wrote:
Of course I made up that 1% figure but I don't suppose it's far out. Just
look at the phenomenal number of crap websites out there. There are
something like 100,000 people offering web design services in the UK (10,000
in London alone) yet GAWDS membership (which is global) is only around 500
and I believe WSG membership is similar.
Don't confuse volume with quantity. Lots of people do. There are a lot
of crap sites out there but that doesn't mean there's 1 crap designer
for every crap site. A lot of the time, the crapness has to do with the
business manager who over-rules any technical considerations because he
wants animated pictures of little ponies flying round the product.
1 crap designer can turn out many, many crap sites. The damage done by
Sieglal's Designing Killer Websites (1st edition - he recanted later)
was huge. Back when I was starting, I bought it and used it as a bible
of what not to do, but many used it as a how-to guide, and some of those
sites still exist.
Also add in the spectrum of experience from people creating websites.
Some are just learning, some are doing it on the side for their schools
or offices - these are not professional web designers and you shouldn't
include them in your 'spurious assessment' ;-) but they are the key
people to reach out to, if I could figure out how to do it.
I started building web in 1996, when bandwidth was an issue (9600 was
common here in New Zealand and 56K was only just arriving) and the
techniques I learned were aimed at optimizing for speed and volume.
Funnily enough the same principles apply to accessibility but I wasn't
learning accessibility per se. I didn't join any groups although there
were a few around, but I did get on several mailing lists (some of which
I'm still on). Some people just aren't joiners. And I don't see
participation in the WSG as "joining" exactly, as there are no dues, no
elections and no formality - it's just a place to come and talk.
There may be lots of lone coders out there, religiously adhering to
standards we don't know and I can't think of a way to find out for sure.
Let's make our talking places more well known and inviting, rather than
the fearsome arena that many fora become, with the resident experts
snarling at the clueless. (Not saying that about the WSG as it is
usually quite civilized)
Which is all to say "don't make up statistics that others will take as
gospel" as they'll come back and bit us all in the arse.
Those who take standards-compliant design seriously tend to be individuals
producing small volumes of work,
I call "unproven assumption" - you may be right but we just don't know.
but the large volumes are typically
generated by organisations that neither know nor care about
standards-compliance. They are invariably tied to enterprise-scale CMSs that
guarantee the code will be horrible. Likewise, ASP.Net implementations can
be made to be standards-compliant but it takes a huge amount of work so most
organisations just use it as it comes out of the box.
So the simple answer is 'focus on those manufacturers' - yes? Get THEM
to change and you won't need to bemoan those chumps who use their stuff
"out of the box" instead of hiring us bespoke designers at our
outrageous rates.
Curmudgeonly,
Mark Harris
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