Web Standards for Skeptics

or “Web Standards as a Competitive Advantage”

Michael Montgomery

Montgomery Studios

Who Are You?

“I don’t care about web standards.

I care about Readers, Revenue, Profit, ROI, SEO, Fast pages, Customers, Costs, Maintenance, Development, Scalability, Flexibility, Liability”

Questions & Answers

(aka “Objections & Excuses”)

“Web Standards are too much work”

“Too many existing pages”

“It works in browsers”

“It works in IE

“Search engines don’t care”

“Search engines don’t validate”

“...so they can’t hold it against me”

“They’re boxy and ugly”

“Too many standards”

“They are a moving target”

“I don’t get it”

“Accessibility? We have no disabled users”

“My SEO guy says”

“But it’s a web application”

“The ads don’t validate”

“What’s ‘semantic markup’?”

Some Principles of Web Standards

Some Benefits of Web Standards

(Remember the blockquote at the beginning?)

What’s next?

Resources

More Resources

Web Standards for Skeptics

Michael Montgomery

Montgomery Studios