Re: Fw: Front Pages

At 06:07 p.m. 08/29/98 PDT, susan banta wrote:
>That same client who wants accessibility and bells and whistles also
>wants a good (read cheap) price for the site. If I have to spend hours
>creating all the workarounds and writing the sniffers and sub-routines
>to make the flashy things happen for the 3/4 browsers yet degrade for
>the older non javascript ones or for accessabiity how do I justify 
>that to him?

Well, that's between you and your client, isn't it?  A client is
_always_ going to want more, for less money.  This isn't even a web
design theory question, it's a basic of business.

>I can give him both ..... but will he pay?

I dunno, will he?

>Or do I just 
>do what I can sell him in terms of gimmicks and put in the alt and
>title tags and let it go at that ? True accessible does not have to
>equal boring and plain but how much accessibility will the client pay
>for when he can only "see" the gimmicks and gadgets?

I dunno, most _smart_ businesspeople will realize that they are
hiring you to make a website for the _masses_, not just for _them_.

What do you tell your client when he was over at his kid's house,
and tried to show them all the neat things he'd been talking about
that his website does, and yet when they tried from AOL, it looked
terrible and didn't work?

How does your client complain when he brags about his javascript
feature -- that works fine on his Netscape -- to his supplier, and
the supplier tries it (in MSIE, AOL, an old version of Netscape) 
and it doesn't work?

For this reason, it's important to keep your clients educated.  Tell
them, "sure, I can give you that java script, it will cost you an
extra $XXX", or "yeah, I can make this work in 20% of the browsers,
for an extra $YYY, but 80% of the people won't see it", or "I'm
going to charge you extra money to make sure EVERYONE can use this
instead of just SOME people."

The latter is something I would never say to a client, by the way.
How incompetent do you want to look? :)

If the client says, "No, I'm not willing to pay for <K>", where <K>
is an accessible website, a really useful Java applet, or anything
else, that's the client's decision; nothing you can do about that.

Hopefully your clients will be farsighted enough to see the value
in _everything_ you offer.  If not...well, that's what we like to
call "bad clients".

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn(at)idyllmtn.com>             http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton, California
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