Selling Web Standards is Hard

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.

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Money-Making Schemes

I love the way Fojar floats from one money-making scheme to another. None of them ever really fail, it’s just that when they prove to be unprofitable after a week, development is halted to focus on the next idea. Disadvantage: Possibly our short attention span is preventing us from ever fully-developing any idea to its maximum potential. Advantage: Short attention span leads to a great deal of experimentation and learning processes, not to mention that it’s a lot of fun.

What’s that? You want some examples? Well, the earliest I remember was trying to get someone to pay Steve to do Pokey. Never took off due to Steve’s feeling of compromised artistic values. Then there was the time that Fojar was going to become a major ISP, and we were going to make all the money we needed from selling accounts and web design. Most recently, there’s A1-Super, which should make us rich any day now, when we sell 3000 subdomains, the space ninja store, the banners, which we’re currently plotting to get major banner ad places to pay us to have, and FCS, which as far as I know, has not yet sold a single copy.

Are any of these bad ideas? Not at all! Most of them (FCS especially) are fantastic ideas, and I really think they have potential. But when you’ve heard Steve say “If we can just sell 1000 accounts, which I don’t think is unreasonable, we’d be set!” over twenty times, you begin to take it with a grain of salt.

To quote Miles, “THAT’S THE FOJAR WAY,” and I for one wouldn’t have it any other way. Well, maybe have it the same way, but actually sell something. ;)