1 Nice one

Excellent notion to push, Rob. I hope your writing skills serve to inspire – I can’t help but fear they may serve to induce the notion of, “Yes, that’s exactly what excellent designers should do, and I’m an excellent designer – therefore…”

The causality in that ‘extra 0’ analogy works all over the place!

I think the point should be made to all designers who get blinded by the light of standards: these things are only beautiful for their reasons. If you wield ideas in the face of adversity without fully grasping their cause, they are no longer torches. They are bludgeons.

posted at 10:56 am on November 14, 2006 by Barney Carroll

2 Stop to think

A lot of that rings true. (Not the bits about multi-million mega-buck contracts, but the other bits).

Those of us who work in web design every day, and who have embraced web standards, accessibility, usability and new technologies can become so used to applying best practice that we forget why it is best practice. For those of us without a natural ‘gift of the gab’, it is easy to get caught out by these basic questions.

Yes, we all know that using descriptive link text improves search engine performance and makes it easier for people scanning the page quickly to home in on what they are looking for. But when put on the spot by a difficult client, how many of us can swear that we wouldn’t be reduced to stuttering about people not using clicking devices, or printing the page?

posted at 12:12 pm on November 14, 2006 by Stephen Down

3 What if you work for the unenlightened?

I loved this, and it is entirely true that if you were to let your evangelism of standards-compliance and all things sacred (like removal of frames/tables for layout, semantic mark-up, etc.) lapse that you may lose the ability to convince someone of their importance.

However, the dilemma that I face is that I have come a little too close to being fired for trying to convice the very company I work for of the inadequacy of our design. So, how would you suggest that one takes the enlightened messages of Web 2.0 to the company for which you work? Is there information or research out there to affirm that the change in philosophy actually comes with improvements to the bottom line?

This, to me would make it all worthwhile: having concrete data to backup my preaching.

Loved the post.

posted at 12:44 pm on November 14, 2006 by Luke Dary

5 Your article not only concerns webdesign

What you wrote is true for any customer relationship in most businesses. There are people you can convince and there are people who have opinions solid as rock. But it is up to you to decide what want to do, quit the work or doing what the customer wants, allthough you know it better. But in second case you have to inform your customer what he gets.

posted at 01:33 pm on November 14, 2006 by Katja Schiemann

7 I like it

I think everyone will have a difficult client more than once in life. It’s difficult to handle their questions, but it’s a good training for yourself. Since we had our first I never go to meetings without a good preparation before.

Thanks for this article made up my day!

posted at 03:10 pm on November 14, 2006 by Silvan Hagen

8 Lovely article!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and I’ve renewed my resolve not to resort to physical violence when the client requests reggae music in the background and garish splash pages.

posted at 03:49 pm on November 14, 2006 by Beth Long

9 First guess is usually right

As someone once said, “Usually your first guess is right”.

In the case of the web, “click here” was the first guess for how to tell people about links. There’s still some merits to it in the right situation. Though, I still think it needs to be in the right situation and not saturated through a site.

Cheers, John

posted at 04:21 pm on November 14, 2006 by John Bertucci

10 Good job

I can only echo what others have been saying here; great article, Rob! Nicely written and with a good point to make. Though, really… is beating a difficult client to death with a philosophy book all that bad? :)

posted at 05:23 pm on November 14, 2006 by Andrew Collington