The Ignorant Client vs. The Passionate Developer
October 4, 2006 at 4:12 pm (GMT+1) · Categories: Web Development, Best Practices, Business
As some of you might have suspected for years,- our fine field of web development is a place of war. The alliance of passionate web developers who care about standards, good code, accessibility, usability and other things are in a constant hate/love relationships with the union of clients who know as much about this field as some presidents know about ‘nucular’ weapons. The battlefield is filled with table layouts, WYSIWYG editors, inaccessible web 2.0 sites and bad code.
I think one of the biggest issues thesese days is, that we, the passionate developers, try to create systems a 10 year old could use. We fall for the clients demanding Word-like WYSIWYG editors and build right management systems for people we wouldn’t trust to spell out the word ‘Security’. And to make it even worse, the people we work for consider our work to be something everybody could do. The 90s created a mindset saying that everybody could make a web site (see this article). And it’s true, every 12 year old can make his own web page. So I can understand the difficulty clients have when they are demanded to pay somebody $50 (or more) per hour for something their kids could do. I mean, how should one go about explaining them the difference between invalid tag soup and standard compliant beauty? How do you raise their aweareness for quality that’s invisible to them?
I think the answer is education. Uhm, that doesn’t sound very original, does it? So let me try to rephrase it. Taking away their WYSIWYG toys and replacing them with our geeky alternatives like Textile is not going to cut it. Telling them it’s going to be very benifital for them isn’t going to cut it either, because after looking at the obscure markup they already decided it’s way to complicated and stoped to listening to you. I’ve tried it - saying “it’s really simple, just take a look at it” - and failed. Same goes for other things like standards based html, accessible JS and good php code. Clients will not be able to percieve the difference between a good and a bad site just because you tell them it’s bad to use table’s, inline JS or even worse crimes against progress in our field. I think we’ve all triedto convince a client to use a certain technology or follow our suggestions and failed misserably because we bored them to death by being to technical. We spent way too much time talking in our geeky language with our geeky friends and build a huge barrier in terms of communication. And I think our only way out, is to understand how our clients think:If I was a client, I would think it’s perfectly fine to expect somebody to make a web page, for $300.
I would tell the developer that I want this really sharp looking site and the ability to maintain it myself. I know my 13 year old son has his own site, so this should be more then enough money for the task, so maybe I can get it for as low as $250. So after sending out a short email with my basic requirements to 2-3 developers, they give me estimates ranging from $350 to $1500. The cheapest one says he’ll use some system called Joomla and editing my page will be as easy as editing a word document. The most expensive one talks about (x)HTML, CSS, PHP, MySql, Textile, ACL, AJAX, Accessibility, Usability and how all of this will be really good in terms of SEO and standard compliance. Hm the expensive guy sure sounds like he knows a lot of stuff, but I really can’t see how this beats “editing my page like a word document” for $350. So I give the job to the cheap guy, get an alright-looking web site, fill in my content and finally got rid of this “get a business web site” task from my todo list.
–Felix Geisendörfer the_undefined