Right On Molly! I''ve talked to a lot of marketing/sales people about web standards and these are some of the things I mention. There are so many rationales that site issues that are important, but don''t really address the ROI / value of web standards.

I''m always amazed at the number of people that view standards as some technical decision that''s still up for debate. It''s not. Any developer/designer worth hiring won''t touch table-based design or archaic non-semantic markup with a 10ft pole. Even most of us ASP.NET guys have gotten with the program.

Great post! Quick question for Molly; how do you see the following fitting into the arguments you make above:

* SVG
* The Canvas tag
* HTML 5

Best,
Brad Neuberg

Interesting set of points. Good article.

Sam

@Ian and @pinkpetrol.com: Glad you liked it.

@ian: Well, you and I have long agreed on several of your points. Gonna be at MIX with Kelly perchance? Let''s make sure to get together!!

@brad: SVG - without native browser support, a dead puppy (sorry Dean Jackson)
HTML 5 and the Canvas Tag - application methodology. If you look at HTML5, the goal is really to empower a set of APIs and utilize the DOM to create interaction. When we think about it, this is really what Adobe, Microsoft, et al, are trying to do with their various "apps platforms" - the way I see it is HTML/DOM/JavaScript/Capable Browser is essentially the apps model. Great question.

Oh, and Chris Wilson dropped an email regarding user experience. A bit of a clarification is due here - it''s not that the user experience of let''s say an iPod and a desktop should be the same, but that it''s up to the application developers to ensure it''s a good one.

I often say "user" when I mean "developer/designer" because that''s my typical audience. Something I need to watch out for!

Thanks all!

I can''t believe that after 10 years, we still have to sell this message! We still have a goal of training the trainer as far too many new websites have many issues in standards compliance and accessibility and this is exacerbated by the use of the the unforgiving (and arguably inappropriate in most cases) XHTML.

Nice post~
I''m just looking for this post. viewpoint to ROI.

This post help many supporter(developer, designer) for web standards in korea. We want logic that convince our client, president.

Tanks!

Thanks Molly – I have found that the best way to establish the business case for best-practice is to give some numbers that the business bods can understand.

Last year one of the major pieces I was involved with saw a 28% increase in conversions with an overall reduction in the cost per unit sale (in this case tickets) after the site was reworked with web standards. I don’t expect that it was entirely down to best-practice but it is certainly a major contributing factor. The site has scaled to 4 languages from the same original foundations and I expect that client has had an excellent return on their investment. The website will last for many years to come and is a long-zoom triumph of convention over configuration.

It would be nice to see more quantitative feedback on best-practice benefits. What benefits have Microsoft seen from their efforts?

Molly - thanks for a great article :)
Excellent list of powerful persuasive points :-)

Invaluable article, Molly.

It does seem strange that we still have to find arguments to convince people that doing things the right way is the best way, but I think that with this excellent summary you''ve done the hard work for all of us.

Nice styling on the ordered list, BTW :-)

Back in 2004, I was responsible for moving Multimap (http://multimap.com) over to web standards. Multimap, recently bought by Microsoft, is a huge site: it''s the most popular mapping site in Europe and serves millions of pages of day. I''ve related the story before (http://clagnut.com/blog/366/) but it''s worth reiterating the details here.

The benefits many. For a start it vastly simplified the maintenance as the markup was much simpler. More tangible than that, the average page weight was halved from 65Kb to 35Kb. On millions of page views a day you can imagine the cost savings.

Well, bandwidth consumption certainly decreased with the declining page weight but not by the proportion we were expecting. What actually happened was that people starting using the site more. It seems the faster pages (both in terms of bandwidth and rendering) resulted in more page views as people panned, zoomed and searched significantly more than they did before. So not only did the switch to CSS layout save Multimap money, it made Multimap money (page views = banner ad impressions) and quantitatively improved people’s experience (more page views per visit).

As Peter said I can''t believe we''re still needing to have this conversation, when huge sites like Multimap converted was four and a half years ago.

We still need to let the words out about Web Standards and mostly its time to do it not only in our own web centric groups but with less techy people.

I''m "fighting" in a emarketing department mostly fill up with marketing people and those kind of arguments are a bare minimum as marketing people (and upper managment) need number... and yes damn spreadsheet and "in the face" powerpoint ;)

A good read, thanks Molly keep up the good work!

Nice list of ROI factors, Molly!
Like Peter said in his comment, it is amazing that after 10 years of the web standards movement, we still have to train new developers and explain to the business people the benefits of it.
In this internet era, where everything evolves fast, I wonder why it has taken so long?

Sorry about last entry - pressed enter too soon :-(
Great summary Molly :-)
As an Educator training web developers - it is always nice to have concise summaries to refer to, and to back up my teaching.

lol microsoft and web standards are two words that aint compatible, every web developper knows this

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useful post thanks

Great post...
So what options do we as designers and developers have about companies like Microsoft that release a product such as Outlook 2007... where they grind with their boot heel web standards into the dirt.

Standards go both ways.

I''d like to add one more reason:

IT''S MORE FUN!

I like to enjoy my work, and using strict markup and CSS is more fun (and more artful) than the current alternative - old style table-based design.

this is a great message. I just can''t believe that its been 10 years still in the making and we need to be on soapboxes for best practices for web standards as making business sense. Great way to lay out the points we still have to touch on whenever bringing up project to speed.

MS and web standards - oh yes! Maybe Microsoft start at their own pages before putting out such ''articles'' (I''d hardly call it that).

And what''s with the ugly brown...?!

What an useful article! Thanks! :)

Thanks to everyone who enjoyed the article and even those who didn''t -- I am looking at you @AC! :) As always, we love hearing from folks with diverse opinions.

@Bonnie - We agree! I recommend what my team does internally, voice your concerns. You would be surprised sometimes how closely Microsoft looks at feedback and reacts to it.

Oh, @AC...brown is the new black. Everyone don''t forget to follow our Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/mixonline.

Peter, it''s going to be a cold day in July before we have to stop making this argument. Fortunately, we seem to get a little more clarity every time we make it.

Thanks for writing this article (I''m definitely going to use it as part of my arguments moving forward).

Taking the time to design and develop with Web standards in mind now, will save a world of heartache when trying to move said project forward. Allowing for cross-compatibility, easier porting of information to other projects, and faster re-designs.

Great short list of important standards topics. When I design sites for clients it''s definitely a selling point for them. They want their site to load REALLY fast and be usable years down the line.

I use a lot of the same arguments in my new business package. However I think you frame things slightly better, I may have revise my own list based on your insights. Thanks.

Thank you for clear artcile. We made translation to Russian: http://webew.ru/articles/1974.webew

It is a pity that censorship exists on this blog. You do bite, and bite very badly... Anyway, as I was saying before, web standards are not the be-all and end-all of web design. None of my websites validate to W3C standards and yet they still are very successful and work fine on multiple browsers and still use deprecated tags.

Molly Holzschlag: shame on you for erasing my original post, which was truthful and honest. Erasing blog posts in this way is contrary to all of the web''s principles.

Hi Fred,

We moderate comments to remove spam, obvious trolls, and disrespectful posts. This is standard practice on blogs and forums. The comments section at MIX Online is a place for civil and respectful dialogue about the topic of our posts, and anything else (including debate about moderation policy) is prone to moderation.

I moderated a post by a person identifying himself as "Who Cares", who took a decidedly disrespectful and polemical tone toward both the author and topic of this post while anonymously making some rather extraordinary and unsubstantiated claims about his background.

@Fred: Nobody claims that sites which fail to take advantage of web standards best practices will fail to function. If that were the case, there would be no need to write this article, since people wouldn''t have a choice. Best practices are best practices because they are considered by experienced experts to be superior, not because they are mandatory or common.

Likewise, nobody claims that web sites which flout best practices will assuredly go bankrupt, nor that proper use of web standards can compensate for a poor business model. However, anecdotes of solvent sites which flout web standards do no more to disprove the ROI of web standards best practices than the existence of companies with bad business models disproves the validity of good business models.

The simple point of this article is that business people who ignore web standards best practices are leaving money on the table. No more and no less.

Page validation and constantly adhering to the latest web standard is, in my opinion, the obsessional activity of a delusional mind - with all due respect of course :)

This was really the crux of my post; designers use all of this SEO and web 2.0 and "AAA page compliancy" gobbledegook purely to bill more hours to their increasingly confused clients.

As for the statement that "people who ignore web standards best practices are leaving money on the table" is again another unsubstantiated anecdotal statement, rather like the one you accused me of making earlier. The FMSUSI criteria can be achieved without strict adherance to web standards. I''ve ignored strict adherance for a decade nearly and my clients'' websites are flourishing.

"Best practice" is a term that changes month-by-month; there is no such thing in the real world of Internet development. Obfuscating functionality with layers of new standards is something I left behind long ago, thank goodness. Even the w3C are ceasing investment in their validation tools - a wise move imho.

@Fred: I don''t know any best practices that "change month-by-month", and I''m certain that none of the articles on our site advocate "layers of new standards" or adoption of a standard just because it''s new. Nor does anyone advocate using a validator as a measure of best practices. The word "validate" doesn''t even appear anywhere on this page, except in your comments -- and then it appears 3 times. I hope you''ll let us know if you see those things being advocated on MIX Online.

We''re talking about pragmatic and widely-accepted principles like unobtrusive JavaScript, semantic HTML, and CSS layout. You can learn about these professional best practices for web standards by attending Nate and Molly''s workshops at MIX09, or by starting with the links provided above. Nate is a founder of Yahoo! front-end web engineering team and sets standards for some of the most popular sites in the world. Molly has helped some of the largest sites in the world see dramatic ROI from web standards best practices.

I''ll take your word that you have lots of new clients lined up who don''t mind table-based layouts and non-conforming markup. If so, more power to you. But you would be a true maverick to argue that this represents superior ROI or established professional best practices. Microsoft would certainly not make such an argument, nor would any of the other top web companies or web agencies that I know.

Semantics eh? The word "validate" goes hand-in-hand with HTML standards, I''m surprised you did not appreciate that. There are a plethora of web validation tools for checking if websites comply (or "conform" to use your word) with various standards, as I''m sure you are aware; you even link to many such websites in various VisitMix''s artcles.

Btw, I didn''t say that I had lots of clients lined up - you did. Of course, the difficulty with clients is keeping them long-term, and that really is the only barometer of developer credibility these days. In any event, a serious developer can only maintain a few clients and do it very well; step one of choosing a "web developer" is that if they have dozens of clients they generally need to be avoided :)

Clients do not worry about the underlying code and standards, I find; they tend more to worry about things like security, back-end code robustness, database performance, and a range of other things that concern real world online businesses, such as the ones I manage day-to-day. I mean, whose really worried if their site has some tables instead of floating divs when there is a hacker executing a SQL injection that could compromise the whole business. The front end is important, of course, that''s the simple bit.

But I stray. ROI is defined by many other things than strict adherance to web standards. Online businesses succeed when they are run like normal businesses, not by people keep fussing over whether to use tables or CSS.

Finally, best practice is something that the coder/developer creates themselves and it is every-changing, almost etheral. One realises this when they have been a developer for a few decades, teaches the subject and publishes some books. Developers refine their code, revisit code, and rewrite it to make it leaner, faster, better. That is best-practice in action. There is no "best practice" to writing a web page or a piece of code. There are "fundamentals", sure, but there are many ways to skin a cat.

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I find web standards a very important part of being a professional in web development and web design. I practice web standards since 2005 and have been quite successful and famous for my efforts of the quality here in Athens, Greece.

Explaining that a website with accessibility and effort also to be highly ranked with web standards help is something i educate my clients with.

Their online business platform is their future investment and if its crappy and not developed due to the web standards its a shame for the TABLE DEVELOPER to have been consulted and not aware of the web standards guidelines we all are about to know and practice.

Looking at the huge corporate companies all over the world is also a shame as not many ofthem seem to have any idea of the standards. It is maybe the advertising companies that are not informed or trained to know these things and they dont implement or educate their clients for web standards.

We need to educate our own clients in order to get further and closr to a web standards practice daily.

Michael

Web development is just another branch of software development if I may say so. Principles apply in all areas, software development or code production included.

People make mistakes, make up for them and look for correct or better ways. As the Web advances, standards-compliant development is the only possible result for cost-effective solutions in the pursuit of money. Period.

If there''s still a number of companies who practice the development in a non-standard way, it''s just the developers they''ve got are below average.

Sorry to be nitpicking, but you''re article is about standards-driven code (or at least part of it is), yet you''re page has 38 warnings on it???

Great list but shortly description all them.

@Joe: While proper use of web standards is about a lot more than validation, and we purposely stay away from the topic of validation in these articles, the page validates XHTML strict with 0 errors for me, using W3C validator. What are you using to validate?

Web standards? Accessibility to sight impaired?

Umm - the bits to input Name etc to make this comment are (for me) shown as dark brown on a black background. Not at all easy to read.

Also, I''ve viewed this page with a narrow window and while the article shows OK after I scrolled across, the comments got chopped off at the place the original window edge was. Slicing characters in half in some places.

I''m currently at work so stuck using IE - it may be better in

Intresting article. I never knew web standards were SUCH a big problem.

Intresting article. I never knew web standards were SUCH a big problem.

Hey molly its me Jacob you have done a great job and should continue the hard work

Good job in making this site to explain to people on all the things that have happened, are happening, and are going to happen to the internet. I found it useful and found out about what I was wondering.

This was amazing

This article seems to make the assumption that you have to convince business stakeholders to use web standards. I''m not sure where anyone got this idea, but as a consultant it hasn''t held true.

Business statkeholders don''t care or even want to know whether their site is developed using web standards or not unless you are charging them more for it or the site doesn''t work for all customers becuse of it (costing them money). The theme here is how it equates to money.

Anyone charging more to develop their site using CSS instead of tables for layout is ripping their customer off. Anyone using tables for layout instead of CSS is also ripping their customers off. The tools used for web development these days handle CSS quite well and there and there is just no reason not to do the main layout using CSS. Laying out small pieces of a site (usually forms) using tables may be required but anything else is just irresponsible. This doesn''t add extra time, its just the new paradigm for developing the site layout.

Theres a lot more to web standards than whether you use tables or not. When using standards you need to limit yourself to the standards supported by the greatest number of browsers (or all browsers if required). Again, the workarounds for CSS in different browsers are well known and there are a number of templates out there that implement the CSS "hacks" already. Where stakeholders will draw the line (and should) is when they get charged extra to make something work in a particular browser. If the customer doesn''t care if his site works in Safari or not he shouldn''t have to pay for it. On the internet, if your site does not work in IE, it doesn''t matter whether it is standards compliant or not, its going to cost the customer money.

I don''t agree that maintenance is any cheaper on a standards compliant site as one that is not standards compliant; or at least that has not been my experience. The reality is that the table based layout that works in IE today will work in the next version of IE as well, whereas this may not be true for the layout using CSS. However if it really is cheaper then there isn''t much convincing to do with stakeholders; they will just pick the lower bid.

What does surprise me is that so many DEVELOPERS have to be educated and shown to use web standards. Maybe ten years ago it was a great effort to use web standards, but that isn''t really true anymore. Today the use of web standards should be a feature that we add to our list rather than an extra expense that we add to the bill.

@Fred- While I do see your point about what clients really care about and I know it first hand, I also have to disagree with your opinion of web standards and ROI. Everything Molly mentioned is true about how you can measure ROI by implementing web standards. I have seen it over and over again not just in a lack of web standards, but a lack of general standards in coding practices in general and how much extra time it has taken me to move some image around on a page because no basic web standards were followed or how some piece of code won''t scale because values were hard-coded into the source code. But that it is not always the developers fault, usually it is because of client expectations to create a fully functional application for the www in two weeks or something like that and left the developer no choice but to skip integral software development phases and cut corners in order to eat. I do believe however that a developers implementation of standards can and do change in the real world depending on your target audience.
Just look at what happened to Target Corp if you need proof of ROI on web standards: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10028109-93.html

Search Engine Optimazation is very difficult. It takes a long long times. I also looked forward to the information about that.
Thanks a lot. great.

But the funny thing is, sometimes the things can conflict. Building a well designed flash site which does not use much text can be good to the eye, but can seriously hurt SEO effects.
Heart

I don’t see how regular web standards would affect SEO results. There are HTML elements that are important to SEO, which can be called do''s and dont''s, but outside of that anything wouldn’t matter too much.

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Funny, this article is almost 2.5 years old and it is still very relevant today as it was back them. Great points on ROI. Thanks for sharing.

Quality article on the ROI of "working smarter not harder" As relevant today as it was when it first appeared.

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