Jaqui Greenlees

I know, This subject has been covered in depth on many blogs, and on many other sites, but as long as sites are not being written to be standards compliant, it won’t die out.

Most business websites are “designed” to answer the following 5 points, with no consideration of website standards.

1. How do we increase revenue?
2. How do we reduce expenses?
3. How do we bring in more customers?
4. How do we get more business out of each existing customer?
5. How do we increase shareholder value?

To answer them, pointing out the benefits of standards compliant websites:

1. How do we increase revenue?

A well written standards compliant website is accessible by everyone, even those who have to use assistive technologies like screen readers. A.J.A.X. and most “Web2.0″ technologies don’t play nice with these technologies.

2. How to we reduce expenses?

A standards compliant website doesn’t have that huge data transfer bill hitting you every month, they tend to use far less data transfer than non-compliant websites. They also play nice with search engine robots, allowing the website to be indexed properly, improving the effectiveness of your SEO and advertising [ Google keywords etc ] for your website, making a lower expense on the advertising feasible.

3. How do we bring in more customers?

Quit driving people away from your business and website with a site that is not accessible.

4. How do we get more business out of each customer?

The short answer, better customer service as well as better customer experience when they are making a purchase from you. A standards compliant website is as easy to use, accessible by all, and isn’t cluttered with extraneous cruft. [ yahoo.com is cluttered, google.com isn't, look at both as the interface for doing a web search and you will find google as done it right. ]

5. How do we increase shareholder value?

When the sales / service revenues are increasing, then the shareholder vale increases along with it. If a company website is designed and developed to be accessible, secure and look good then your internet site expenses are giving a very large return on investment, it can get as high as 3000% [ yes, three thousand ]

An additional point to remember, if a company cannot be bothered to meet the standards for website design and development, why would anyone trust them to meet the standards for their products? I would never trust a building contractor that has a non standards compliant website. I would never trust any company that can’t meet standards that apply in ALL aspects of their business operation. A non compliant website says to people that the company doesn’t meet any standards they are supposed to in any fashion whatsoever. [ Microsoft® is an excellent example, not one Microsoft® product meets the ISO standards set out for software. ]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under Software Development, Website Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.