Web Directions

Cheryl Lead and Ben Buchanan — Moving your Organization to Web Standards

• In: notes
• By:Andrew
• September 29, 2006
• Leave a response

Cheryl’s expe­ri­ence with Virgin Money

I’m going to save the world by mak­ing my com­pany go to web stan­dards — Cheryl Lead

• Used num­bers to sell the idea X more appli­cants if we make it accessible
• 400,000 legally blind web users in the UK. Tesco launched Tesco Access and made 13 mil­lion pounds more via that site the next year. Cheryl doesn’t believe you should have two sep­a­rate sites; I cer­tainly agree.
• Virgin has approx 25 brand val­ues that every­thing must tie in with; most of those relate to cus­tomer ser­vice. Accessibility fits in with this perfectly.
• You must learn how to talk “online” to non-​​online peo­ple. Marketers com­pletely shut down if you talk tech speak.
• Our web site as it stands is a pair of acid-​​wash jeans — Oh my God, we don’t want to be acid wash jeans!
• Having a project spon­sor who under­stands what you’re try­ing to achieve is a key lever­age point. This per­son will help you fight the bat­tles that you will face.
• Endless pre­sen­ta­tions were required to prove that acces­si­ble design didn’t have to be ugly or plain.
• Standards advo­cates want every­one else to be as pas­sion­ate as they are. They want to teach you to fish, not just give you a fish
• Created a 60 page style guide with what markup could be used, etc. Was a night­mare to have to force this upon peo­ple, but at the time appeared to be essential.
• We’ll fix that in faze two — faze two never very rarely comes.
• By push­ing the agency to learn stan­dards, they’ve now turned for good. All their future clients ben­e­fit from the work put in by Cheryl’s project
• Virgin Credit launched six months after Virgin Loans site; used same CSS tem­plates and cut devel­op­ment time in half.
• Going for­ward – need to be care­ful with the main­te­nance; must retain that purity of code into the future.

Ben’s expe­ri­ence with Griffith University

• Start by doing what’s nec­es­sary; then do what’s pos­si­ble; and sud­denly you are doing what you thought impossible
• Central web team that main­tains core infrastructure
• Evolved from tag soup to XHTML/​CSS; frame­sets to frame­less; 20,000 files to 250,000 files; all with­out a CMS.
• It took a long time – Ben invested six years of his life push­ing a cause he knew was right
• 1998: rec­og­nized that the online brand needed to be dif­fer­ent than the print and sig­nage brand; first steps in the right direc­tion. Perl script used to cre­ate text ver­sion of entire site.
• 2001: banned font tags entirely. Publishing tool checked for font tags and rejected them. That one change caused peo­ple to use head­ing ele­ments and basic CSS
• 2003: Killed off Java applet in favour of Flash (lesser of two evils). Java applet crashed browsers. *BAM*. Goodbye NN4
• 2006: XHTML + CSS, no plu­g­ins required; elas­tic em based lay­out. Offered a low con­trast ver­sion after receiv­ing staff feed­back about headaches from extreme con­trast. The end of the sec­ond text ver­sion. Now the one site is avail­able to everyone.
• Be pre­pared! You will have to say unpop­u­lar things that won’t win you any friends. You will need to com­pro­mise. Be ready for the big meet­ings – you’re your sta­tis­tics ready and know your facts.
• Get allies; you will start as a lone voice, but you will soon find oth­ers get onboard as they start to “get it”
• Start with smaller changes; be real­is­tic about what you can achieve at any given stage
• Buy in: You’ll need man­age­ment on side; you’ll need your coders enthused, they must want to make these changes. If you can get mar­ket­ing onside, you will have a very pow­er­ful ally.
• The moral high ground rarely moti­vates actions.
• Appeal to the present audi­ence – You’ll save money attracts man­agers; You’ll save time attracts coders
• Use analo­gies – they really do work!
• Be pos­i­tive, be moti­va­tional. If that fails, then you bring out the Big Stick.
• You are not alone, you are part of a world­wide movement.

3 responses to “Cheryl Lead and Ben Buchanan — Moving your Organization to Web Standards”:

1. • By:budge
   • October 1st, 2006
   

   Is ‘Griffith’, Griffith uni? If so, have they released the updated site yet? coz every page except home­page that I have seen so far (3 ran­dom links from main nav­i­ga­tion) has been in a frameset!?

2. • By:Andrew
   • October 1st, 2006
   

   budge: yes, Ben was talk­ing about Griffith Uni. With over a quar­ter of a mil­lion sta­tic html pages to con­vert, the uptake of the new tem­plate is slow. As most of those pages are cur­rently main­tained by non-​​geek admin staff, we (I work there too) will be wait­ing to fin­ish imple­ment­ing the CMS to switch the rest out of the old frame­set look.

3. • By:Ben Buchanan
   • October 3rd, 2006
   

   Frustrating as it is, the whole-​​site con­ver­sion will take quite a bit of time and not all of the home­page links have been done yet.

   The quarter-​​million assets actu­ally includes all files and not a direct count of the actual con­tent objects (not sure I explained that clearly enough). Counting and fil­ter­ing frame­sets etc intro­duces some com­plex­ity; but no mat­ter how you count it there is a huge amount of work to be done.

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