Your mission, Jesse, should you decide to accept it, is to create, manage and enforce web policies that will ensure the integrity of Neal Advertising. As usual, should you or any member of your I.M. Force be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. This blog will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jesse.
Almost 2 years ago I was brought on to Neal Advertising with a specific mission in mind. What everyone didn’t know was that I’m apart of a “group” that has a very specific goal. To create a better internet where a set of standards are used to better a users experience and clients product.
The beginning was chaotic and slow. I had one employee under me who was very good at what he did but it was still just the two of us. I quickly began to impart my want and need for everything to be compliant, but it wasn’t easy to get everyone on board.
I was fighting an uphill battle. My team members and colleagues didn’t use standards in the past so convincing them the extra work and limitations we’d be putting in place was worth wasn’t easy. However, I knew if I could just teach everyone about standards they would understand and be happy to adopt the policies I was trying to put into place.
The graphics team at Neal Advertising is comprised of some the most talented individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Their designs are amazing and their ability to grasp the crude ideas in my head and bring them to life are exemplary. However, they never had to design for standards or general accessability before. Most of the designers started in print and were later asked to simply design websites. Before I arrived almost everything was developed out in flash and just embedded on a page. There was no thought put into usability, standards, seo, or anything other than creating stunning and impressive graphics. Then here I come pulling the rug out from everyone and asking it all to be different.
I set up a meeting to have the interactive department and the graphics department meet, learn and converse about standards. I presented the idea of standards compliancy, how code should be written a certain way. How standards benefits the user and client on many levels including usability, functionality and over all web happiness. My speech went on for about 30 mins until my first question.
“So we have to do all this extra work, so…. Why are we doing this again?”