Using Web standards is just good marketing

A reporter called me yesterday regarding the work of the Web Standards Project (also known as WASP), a group that promotes the use of Web standards as written by the World Wide Web Consortium (w3.org) in real-world Web sites. Given I had written recently about the failure of Windows Live to pass HTML verification and that WASP noted that a recent ABCNews redesign was non-complaint, I cited that as a clear example that there is clearly an much important work for WASP and Web standards to do.

There are a lot of people out there who can comment on the technology of Web usability and standards (although as a side note, this reporter said that most large analyst firms have actually dropped coverage of the topic in recent months). But more interesting is the concept I presented to the reporter: that complying with Web standards is just good marketing.

Think about it. When a company doesn't support Web standards, what it is saying to the market is that it is only interested in serving visitors and customers who adhere to their platform philosophy, usually one requiring a recent version Windows and Internet Explorer (IE). It is as if a parking garage or restauarant only served customers who drove GM and Ford cars; they can do it, but it's a silly marketing decision since it turns away prospective business.

Now I suspect many will say that the percentage of people who don't use IE is small. But the truth of the matter is that percentage of people using IE has been falling dramatically over the past year. In April this year, WebSideStory noted that IE usage is now less than 90% of the population world-wide. And in some areas like Germany, that number is less than 69%. Here at Blackfriars, the percentage of people visiting our site and blog is about 57%. So sites that do not support Web standards may be telling more than 30% of their prospective customers to go somewhere else.

And it is amazing to me how many business people continue to make the mistaken assumption that all business people use IE and Windows. For example, Hewlett Packard sells printers designed to work on Macs and Linux, and touts that in their marketing. But to get on-line service for those printers, I have to use Windows and IE. Huh? And the irony of all this is that Apple's latest Safari browser is one of the few that passes the current Acid2 test for browser standards compliance.

Even Microsoft is starting to understand that they need standards compliance. A post Thursday on the Microsoft Developer's Network says that Windows Vista will only accept well-formed XML.

The irony of all this is that proper use of Web standards makes a site easier to maintain, easier for search engines to catalog, and more usable on more devices. But that's just icing on the cake. What business people need to know is that using Web standards means you aren't needlessly turning away customers. It's reallly as simple as that.

Technorati Tags: Web Standards, WASP, W3C, Marketing