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Sunday, 3rd June 2007, No Comments »

A web standards business case

You’ve decided you want to move to a web standards based approach, be it to conform to the NZ e-government standards, wishing to implement a structured and disciplined approach to your development team or simply wishing to save your overall bandwidth costs. This is a very simplistic business case for using them.

Your Reasons

Your reasons for including a web standards deliverable into a redesigning, redeveloping or refactoring of an existing site or application could include

• Your content people are having trouble updating the site.
• It maybe difficult to apply large style changes without touching every page
• People with disabilities are having trouble navigating the site
• A business goal is for the site be accessible by mobile users

There’s a obviously a bundle more, each organisation has different requirements and reasons, but finding the ‘quick wins’ is better.

Implementation Options

The options for implementing web standards could be from small incremental changes, such as core reusable ’sections’ and key pages, to a large rollout of a semantic based pages. Your options should be based on your environment, resources, timeline and ensuring each is achievable.

Expected Benefits

Improved user experience

Pages will render quicker

People with disabilities will be able to use the site/application easier

Development Speed

Interface and layout changes can be quickly implemented

Simplifed layout maintenance

Better Quality Control

Pages that have been defined by a doctype can be verified

Predictabile output by modern browsers

New accessing options

People with disabilities will be able to use the site/application easier

People will be able to access the site using mobile devices

Search engines appear to rank sites higher, thus driving more customers

New output options

Easier to reuse content, such as reformatting content for mobile devices

Easier to convert content to other formats, such as PDF with XSL-FO

Low-cost induction and support

Easier developer induction

Setting a benchmark for hiring additional staff

The Risks

• Up to 1% of users may have a diminished user experience
• Some older browser may present incompatibility issues

These risks could be mitigated by using a graded browser support as part of quality assurance testing.

• The CSS could become unmaintainable
• The senmatic nature of the page is not maintained

These risks could be mitigated by ensuring the code and style sheets are correctly documented.

Cost Savings

A simple cost saving is bandwidth, if for example your site does 500,000 page views a month and each page is on average 29.9kb, this means you’d have around 1.78 Gb a month in traffic from pages alone. Redeveloping could mean the average page size drops to 9.4kbs, which translates to 573 Mb a month in traffic.