I tend to agree with Mark. IT guys in my experience tend not to be 'joiners' you work in a corporate IT department and you will quickly realise that people use terms like 'Crypt' and 'Beige'
I have worked from both sides of the fence as both an indepentant but also as the main web guy within a large organisation. Yes there are situations where we have had to use external vendors to design websites purely because they have to resources to deliver quickly...and I can see how these agencies can produce very poor code and have the business owner say 'yes'. But there are also organisations where they will impose a set of design guidelines upon these firms and really put the pressure on them to deliver (especially is industries where you are an essential service and need to deliver to a wide audience of both abled and disabled people). Does it make the firm a bunch of non-compliant designers...perhaps. But I say for every poorly design website, there is someone who says 'Yes that is what I want' or 'that'll do'. > 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 > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ******************************************************************* > > ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
