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?”

FAIL.  I didn’t engage them.  I wasn’t passionate about standards.  I didn’t teach anyone anything important.  This was my fault not theirs.  I can’t expect anyone to suddenly adopt new principles if I haven’t given them a good reason to do so.

If we fast forward a few months I would be sitting in the front row of An Event Apart, Boston 2008 (which is open for registration).  I was listening intently to Kimberly Blessing.  She was speaking about the challenges of adopting web principles.

“Point them to any number of resources on the Web which cite Web standards as common modern development practice, and explain how their leadership in this area will demonstrate to developers the commitment the company is making in their long-term careers.  Introduce them to the community that practices Web standards and show them that there is plenty of support out there, as well as pride, and those things will make them happier. And, slowly, you will change your company’s attitude towards standards. Remember what Gandhi said: ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’ And make the Nike slogan your mantra: ‘Just Do It’.” – Kimberly Blessing

I was impressed, Kimberly had done what I wanted to do and at a much larger scale.  She was passionate about standards and the 500+ people in the room could feel it.  At the end of her lecture she gave out copies of her book to those who had questions.  I quickly racked my brain for a good question to ask, that would also benefit the many people in the audience.

I asked, “How do you get people passionate about web standards when they’ve never had to apply them in the past?”

Her answer was simple, “Show them your passionate about it”.

When I returned to the office I got everyone together again.  I made it clear that I wanted everyone to adopt the ideas of web standards because they wanted to adopt them not because it was going to be mandatory.

“We have an opportunity to take hold of the way the internet is being transformed.  We can empower ourselves and other people in our industry to produce better and more efficiently created web pages.  Yes, standards has that much POWER”

I left that meeting with a better feeling in my gut that things would be changing for the better.  I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and that sacrifices would have to be made by everyone.  We would have to put more time and planning into each design.  This however would create much better results including:

• Ensuring that every single user has a quality experience
• Content will be accessible to more users on multiple browsers, machines, operating systems and devices (handhelds and phones)
• Better Search Engine Optimization, better ranking and more efficient crawling
• Less challenges with Cross Browser Compatibility
• Faster loading
• Management of the site and code would be far easier
• and many more…

The challenge was to help them understand that we aren’t adopting these policies just to make things better now but to make things better for the future.  While we are still working to improve our efforts to adopt web standards we are definetly getting there.

Here are some Extra Resources

• Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition)
• Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites (Voices That Matter)
• W3C QA – How to achieve Web standards and quality on your Web site?
• The Web Standards Project
• FAQ: The Web Standards Project
• Wikipedia: Web Standards

Please take some time to comment on how you have improved web standards policies in your business and websites.