As a moderator/staff member at webforumz.com I was asked to write an article on a topic of my choice for the articles section of the site. I decided to talk about the importance of web standards and used the movie Spiderman 3 to illustrate. Below is the article.
When our illustrious leader PM’d me and asked me to write an article for this section and, in his words, “choose any topic you want.” I thought, great, a chance to flex my creative muscles and talk about a topic that my business partner, Adam, and I are coming across more and more. I speak, of course, about web designer fundamentalism and snobbery and how it relates to your client.
The other day I came across a site that broke so many accessibility rules it wasn’t even funny. Images for navigation with no alt tags, serious breaks after a single re-size and no bgcolor set meaning a difference in browser preference could screw the pooch royally. He even used tables for layout in order to get the content to be centred on the X and the Y. Anyway, Adam contacted them and addressed the issues to him, saying that he really should do something about them as he could easily be alienating a large portion of his audience. I don’t remember the exact words he used but he basically stated that he used to care about web standards and accessibility but now just uses tables and this type of coding because he could “make more money” that way. This attitude shocked me at first but then I thought about what he had said.
How many people know what valid XHTML Strict means, let alone care about it enough to pay the extra development costs? I mean really, as long as the site is accessible enough not to exclude a significant amount of your potential audience and not break when someone changes the size of the text, who cares? In case, of course the client specifically asks for it, why bust your hump?
I came to the conclusion that it’s a question of pride in ones work. Sure, they might not ask for it, or even care what it means but will you truly be happy with yourself if you’ve not given them the most thorough and standards-comprehensive site they could have weather they asked for it or not? “Hell no!” I hear some of you cry… and you’re the ones this article is aimed at. The equivalent of comic book fan-boys and pedants. Don’t get me wrong, I like to give my clients good sites with good accessibility and nice clean code but don’t think for one minute that I’m going to stress myself out by spending hours on features that they, and 99% of their visitors aren’t going to even notice, it just seems silly to me.
To put this point another way, I’ll use another topic I know a lot about, movies. I recently watched the long-awaited Spiderman 3 and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Of course I went online and posted about it in one or two forums that I frequent and you could instantly see the ones who were unhappy with the film fell into two categories. Ones who wanted an all out action fest and cared little about the back-story of Spiderman as laid out in the decades of comics, comparable to our friend who wanted to make more money at the cost of his sites’ integrity and ones who bitched and moaned about the fact that Venom calls himself “I” in the film and in the comics he calls himself “we”, the comic book pedants, much like the people who are oh so anal about the application of pedantic web standards that make little or no difference to the client and their visitors. You see, I fall in the middle ground. I really enjoyed the film dispite it’s tiny flaws and enjoyed the back-story, as I have been a fan of comic book Spidey for years.
This is, I feel, the only way to approach web design without either giving yourself stress induced coronary disease, hair loss or a stroke or becoming nothing more than a money hungry heartless villain who pumps out an inferior product at the cost of your integrity. Make sure your clients get a sense of this attitude too because it will pay dividends. This is because they will see that, while still taking care to make sure that their site is functional and accessible, you aren’t looking to pad out your accounts by including hugely irrelevant features and standards. I have recently purchased a domain name on behalf of a customer who we will be starting design for in the next few weeks and already I have sat down with her on many occasions and outlined, in detail what we have been doing, making sure that she knows that were not doing anything she doesn’t want.
Suppose the answer to “How much should I be concerned with all these web standards and WCAG and WAI and stuff?” is:- as much as the individual job calls for. No more, no less.
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October 3rd, 2008 || 
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