On 20 Dec 2004 05:55:03 -0800, "Travis Newbury"
Please quote in a more normal fashion and include attributions. It's
very difficult to tell what's written by you and what's written by
other people.
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See my response in another thread as to why I, and I guess others, can
not or will not do that.
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I feel that is a woosy way out. YMMV
I can not discuss a client's web site in a public forum without their
consent. If that makes me woosy (wussy? woozey? I don't know the only
definition of woosy I can find is a variant of "oozy" which doesn't
seem to fit) then so be it. I call it professionalism.
So do you want examples of web sites or examples of winning arguments?
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Winning arguments can be meaningless if you can not show the customer a
real life example. I can defeat the any argument you have by opening
IE and displaying the "broken site" on the clients computer.
Fine. If your client only wants a site that works in IE with factory
settings and all optional technologies turned on get him to sign off
on that spec. You've upheld your end of the bargain - you've pointed
out the problems with doing it that way and he's decided that he's not
interested. Take his money, build his site and move on.
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Is your company interested in attracting trendy young people with lots
of money to burn? Great because those are the people who will be
surfing the web on their wrist watches or whatever next year's coolest
gadget turns out to be.
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Good argument, but where's the beef? Show me the proof that I am
losing thousands because someone can not see the site on a wristwatch
browser. Does the proof even exist? Not to mention "Mr. customer,
when is the last time you went browsing on your phone?" chances are
they never have.
The point is that you can not predict what the next big thing will be.
But if you write according to standards then you have a better chance
of being handled properly by whatever it is.
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On the other hand, all the baby boomers are now entering a very
wealthy late middle age. That's a big market sector, and one that's
going to be experiencing increasing eyesight problems over the next
few years. Drop all those text-as-images and px sized text and make
sure that all your content is resizable and hence legible.
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"Well, Mr. Joe Client, just open IE and go to the site. Well you can
see everthing and so can everyone else. Oh those few people that have
bad eyesite can easily change the size of the fonts.... They are use
to doing that all the time. "
No they're not. If the text is rendered as graphics or sized with px
in CSS then they can not resize it in IE. So your client is either
ignorant or lieing when then say that, it's your job as the
professional expert to politely correct them.
Anyway, why should your client care how you code font sizes in CSS?
I've never met a client who insisted on px font sizes.
Argument defeated. Why? Because it WORKED on the clients browser.
Ask your client to have his mother test the site. Ask your client to
sit a few feet further back and test the web site.
Anyway, no one is suggesting that it shouldn't work in the client's
browser. But why not have it work in the client's browser and everyone
else's?
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Where are you? In an increasing number of countries accessibility is a
legal requirement for some categories of web sites. If you're in the
US then only government web sites are affected. But in the UK and
Australia commercial sites are also affected.
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In the US. So that's all that matters to me (and to most companies in
the US) "The punchline" in Atlanta Georgia does not give a crap about
accessability laws in England.
Well, this newsgroup is about the WWW, so the advice you get here will
assume that you're asking about a global audience. Please go to a
US-centric newsgroup for US-centric advice.
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How about corporate firewalls that block downloads of [whatever]?
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That argument may work if the company's biggest clients are corporate
sales, but...
Mr. Customer, Companies are really cracking down on "browsing" at the
office. These people will all come back to you site when they are at
home....
Ah, at home, where they only have dial up rather than a nice fat
corporate pipe...
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Really? Go to site, see blank screen, go away.
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With the exception of the fringe sites, a blank screen is hardly what
the IE, mozilla, or opera user will see.
If your site is built in Flash with no fallback then a user without
Flash will see a blank screen. Ditto many graphic heavy sites with no
alt attributes. Or sites that rely on JS to redirect to different
pages or to load content.
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Reality is that a web site that works for 100% of people has a larger
market than one that works for 99% of people.
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This is true if (and only if) design is meaningless in all cases.
Unfortunataly, the animals browsing the web are Humans.
The design can be anything you like. A site that works for 100% of
users and which looks 'cool' for 99% of them still beats a site that
works for 99% of users and which looks cool for 100% of that 99%.
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Reality is that if your web site works the same way as other web sites
then users will find it easier to use.
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So if your website works the way the others do (and the majority of the
others are bad you have to agree)
99% of web sites are crap. 99% of everything is crap.
But most web sites do not colour the scroll bars. Most web sites use
HTML forms for inputs. Most web sites only carry out minimal CSS
formatting on form elements. Most web sites do not open new windows.
Most web sites do not try to disable the right mouse click. Most web
sites do not use Flash. Most web sites do not use frames. Most web
sites do not **** up the back button.
This seems to be the exact opposite
of everything else you just said. Do I make my site like the rest of
the web, or do I make it like the ones no one (including yourself) will
show here?
Try using a shopping basket built in Flash to one built with standard
HTML. See how the little things like cursors and stored user data are
different or absent. Those little things make users feel comfortable
and secure. And when you're trying to get their credit card details
its the little things that count. And look at a shopping cart built
entirely in Flash where multiple pages are in the same movie. Whoops,
if you use the back button to check on something you entered on the
previous 'page'.
I recently upgraded both PhotoShop and Dreamweaver. The Adobe site was
easy to use and the upgrade purchase took less tha five minutes. The
Macromedia site use Flash heavily for no good reason other than
corporate pride and was a pain to use. Three browsers, several
clearings of the cache and restarts, an angry e-mail to customer
support and over half an hour later I finally purchased the upgrade.
Next time I buy from Amazon not direct from Macromedia. The Amazon
forms all work the way I expect them to work and work in all my
browsers and don't need any extra plugins to be installed and enabled.
That's good usability. That leads to fewer abandoned purchases.
Please do not take this thread the wrong way. I am sure there are
plenty of people here that would love to give their client a great
accessable site, but are tired of losing contract to the wiz-bang
developers because they can defeat any accessability argument you can
come up with by simply opening the site in IE.
And a few months later I'm asked to come in and fix the broken site.
It happens.
Only this morning I got a phone call asking from a recruiter asking
whether I could do layout with CSS instead of tables and whether I
could build sites to WAI Level AA.
I've been doing this stuff for seven years. I've been pushing
standards and accessibility all that time and over the last few years
I've seen huge changes in the market - web sites that are cool to look
at but a pain to use are so lats century. If Atlanta, Georgia hasn't
caught up with the rest of the world then maybe you need to start
educating it.
"only a few nerds and computer geeks use the other browsers" will win
every time.
Nerds and computer geeks spend more on online than other people.
Actually, some of the greatest resistance to using standards comes
from the nerds and computer geeks. The ones who code ASP and run IIS
servers and blather on about needing to support IE and how MS make the
'de facto' standard. The marketing and design crowds are often much
more open to the idea of reaching a larger more varied audience.
I build sites that are as accessible and usable as possible. Even when
the client isn't interested I do the best job I can. I don't need
permission to do things the right way and neither do you. Try it.
Steve
