cost-benefit analysis of standards compliance

All,

Steph, in her intro email, mentions:

- convincing Management
        Concrete evidence of the benefits of deploying Web standards,
  (tangible) cost-benefit analysis. We don't seem to have this
  information, how can we get it? What else?


This would be incredible information if it can be found/compiled. At least
in the corporate world, (tangible) cost-benefit analysis is almost always
the underlying determinate factor. If you can show a manager that it will
save time and/or money (thereby "making" money) they will go for it. If they
don't see this than it's questoinable.  I have had to do whatever upgrading
to standards compliant code I've done as a "black project" - i.e. slipping
it in during normal development, without taking any additional resources to
do so.

I haven't seen much in the way of cost-benefit analysis out there. Here are
a couple of things:


This first one is from where else? the wasp (who knows, maybe whomever wrote
it is on this list).

http://www.webstandards.org/about/ - Under the heading "Quandaries and
Costs" the following is included "The fractured browser market added at
least 25% to the cost of developing all sites." 



This one is used to make a dramatic impact - there's no way to say how much
of the amount really went into "upgrading" to later browsers and how much
was "corporate branding" rework/look and feel/etc. 


http://www.spazowham.com/standards/ - "The Wall Street Journal paid US$28
million for the last revision to their WSJ Online website. Along with
improvements to infrastructure, this revision also covered improvements to
the site's HTML. Reportedly, some features of their old website had stopped
functioning in the latest versions of the Netscape and Internet Explorer
browsers. This is because the original designers of WSJ Online attempted,
with varying degrees of success, to preserve the look and feel of the
publication's print version."



There is, of course, a lot of material relating to the benefits of
Accessibility compliance. One of the rules in the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines is that the web page use w3c standards. Even though Section 508
in the U.S. doesn't legally  require standards compliance, for accessibility
to work you really need to be standards compliant. So some of the
cost-benefit analysis of Accessibility could be applied to standards
compliance. If anybody knows of good statistics there, please point them
out.

 While I haven't read through it all the way the w3c does have the
following:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/benefits.html - Auxiliary Benefits of Accessible
Web Design


Jeff Moyes
Multimedia Programmer
Allen Communication Learning Services,
a division of Mentergy U.S.A.
ph: 801.799.7231
fax: 801.537.7805
jeffm@mentergy.com

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 17:23:06 UTC