Space Ninja

I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make future updates easier, the Client Services team is afraid the client will come back and say that we should charge them less for updates.

For a standards zealot like myself, this was hard to hear. Like most deciples of Zeldman, when someone asks me why we should use web standards for a site, I go back to the CSS talking points in this article from A List Apart. First, web standards mean dramatically improved accessibility, even degrading gracefully in older browsers that don’t support CSS. Secondly, standards-compliant sites tend to be cheaper to produce and maintain when compared to older table-based layouts, and finally, standards mean that a site is “future-proof” because they will be much easier to maintain and update as time passes and coding standards continue to change.

What I learned in this conversation is that only one of those is really something that our Client Services team can sell. Client care about accessibility - not because disabled access is a big issue, but because accessible sites are also more search-engine friendly. We can proudly point to several examples in our portfolio where we refreshed a client’s site with standards and their search engine rankings showed a marked improvement.

On the flip side, clients rarely care about future-proofing their websites. This is perhaps due to the enterprise-level clients that we tend to work with, but our clients rarely want to spend more money today to make things easier in the future. Typically, our clients have to struggle for every bit of their marketing budgets, and web is usually only a small fraction of what they get. So when they hear us say that doing something now will save them money someday, their instinct is to decline.

Most frustrating, however, was when our Client Services VP told me that web standards sites are not cheaper. After going around the table a few times, we managed to agree that we were using different definitions of cheaper. When I say a site is cheaper, I mean that initial production of the site will take somewhat less time than a comparable table-based layout, and that future updates to the layout or design of the site will take much less time than they would have otherwise.

However, her experience with our standards-based designs has been that they take about the same amount of time for both initial production and any future updates. They may not cost more, but they don’t cost less. The problem here is that the sites she was referring to had major content updates, not just design updates. If a design update keeps the same content and markup, but only changes the look and feel, then I can do the entire update via CSS, and save a great deal of time because I’ll be updating many pages at once, rather than updating dozens of table-based pages. But if the client wants us to add new features or anything else that requires changing the markup as well as the CSS, then she’s right that the updates take about the same amount of time as they would have in a non-standards site.

That kind of thing causes a nightmare for the Client Services team. If we tell a client that updates to their site in the future will be cheaper (without qualifying that we’re talking about certain kinds of updates), and then we come back with a price quote that’s not cheaper, the client gets upset, and it puts the Client Services team in a bad position.

Certainly, this kind of thing can be avoided by properly educating the client, but that’s a whole different can of worms. The important take-away for me was to immediately stop claiming that standards-based sites are cheaper without adding the qualifier that they are only cheaper under specific circumstances.

The way to sell standards to Client Services is to tell them that it will dramatically improve accessibility and search engine rankings, and won’t cost more than a comparable table-based design.