Target audience

We need to ensure that this project doesn’t drown in purely technical stuff. It will mostly be management that decides upon which Web Publishing System to use and/or which Web designer to hire. We need to help these non-techies make informed decisions.

Certification should help with that. In its simplest form, A “WRI approved” stamp should say it all. But to achieve that will require a campaign to make clear what that stamp means and why it matters. Essentially this would be a “branding” campaign. We’ll need to communicate on the target audience’s level. That means explaining how/why standards matter and doing so in as non-tech language as possible and using real world examples. As shocking as the idea may seem to some of us geeks and academics, television-type ads may well be the way to do this. Our society is extremely visually oriented, so let's make “why interoperability matters” visual.

For example, people buying Web sites or Web Publishing Systems need to be aware that there is absolutely nothing strange about requiring the product to comply with relevant standards. Some (very few, it seems) web designers do offer this: a sort of ‘warranty’, that the site will be HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 compliant. If the customer wants to, he can pay extra to have the site circumvent certain bugs in certain browsing situations. If the customer insists on certain ‘behaviour’ that will break standards, he’ll lose his warranty - with all the risks of losing potential customers due to bad accessibility and possibly even getting sued for not complying with legislation.

On the ‘positive approach’ side, we need to communicate that well-designed sites are often cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain (including redesign - just change the CSS), will be indexed better by search engines (thus offer better ‘ranking’) and will generally load faster - better user experience and less bandwidth cost.