Digital Web has an excellent write up on adopting a Web Standards approach from within the Corporate environment. Well worth the read for those that are working from within this realm of development as you may find that many of the struggles that they have you have too:
After a few weeks, the pressure began to build in our isolated building. As the launch date of our initial website approached, scope creep became a big problem. Stakeholders who signed off on designs beforehand would start to see final, assembled products and make fundamental architectural changes, as they had not fully understood the signed-off documents they had approved only weeks earlier.
This post makes some great references to finding the keys to success in getting your project done and done right.
- Baby Steps
- Don’t be a Control Freak
- Pick your Battles
- Just Do It
- Personal Sacrifice
These might be a little bit common-sensical but a great deal of common sense is lost when put under pressure. Choices that you’d usually make under the calm of an uneventful day are left wasted on the floor when word comes in from outsides your team that things must change.
My team succeeds at corporate web standards because we:
a) educate
b) educate
c) steadfastly “do it our way”
d) deliver our products
Education in the corporate land perhaps the largest hurdle to overcome. Most corporate people have very little technical understanding of how the web actually operates within modern browsers. Finally, when you come across one that does have their head on straight, they might be more than a few years behind in the current trends of thinking (IE 5.5 anyone?). Your goal is to evangelize in a major way the benefits of doing it right via Web Standards. Start small and prove to them why you make the semantic choices you do. What has worked for me is to prove examples of real world problems by providing web standards solutions through a simple quiz. The W3C exists for a reason and your designs and solutions should scale around that. Explaining to a designer, a stakeholder, a programmer why a Web Standards approach is the right way is always going to get you the win.
Stick to your guns when it comes to doing things the right way. In no way would you want your brake mechanic to slap a hack on your car, so why would you want that for your site and your audience? Doing it right and staying steadfast proves that your solutions are repeatable and safe.
Finally, one of the great benefits of Web Standards is that its clearly documented and approachable which aids greatly in producing web sites at a quick pace. If you’ve ever had to paint on a design using tables, you know its not a joy. Separation of content and style is every front-end developers joy. It will be a joy that is shared when you need to make those changes to your site 1 month, 12 months, or longer.