What is Quality?

A fairly long article on quality by Andy Rutledge makes the case that when we talk about web standards, what we’re really talking about is quality. We completely agree.

We like car analogies. Here’s one we’ve used before:

If you bought a car that could only drive on smooth asphalt but couldn’t drive on concrete unless you drove in reverse—and couldn’t drive on gravel unless the sun was shining, would you think that was a very high-quality car? Of course not!

Would you buy that car just because it was cheaper than a Ford or Chevy? Of course not! Why? Because you understand there’s more to a car than the price. There’s a quality consideration.

You could put money into fixing it to work on all roads in all conditions, but over time that would amount to more than just paying for a real car, plus you have to deal with the headache of fixing a job that should’ve just been done correctly to begin with. Nobody needs that headache.

Web site work is surprisingly similar. There are plenty of places to go to get really cheap work done, but it all ends up as a car that only works in perfect conditions rather than something to be proud of.

Benefits of Quality

As the W3C, the governing body of web standards specifications, themselves discusses, when you buy standards compliant web sites you put your resources to work where they’re really needed. You generally pay more at the beginning, but the total cost of ownership of a high-quality web site is actually lower than a low-quality site.

The W3C article linked above goes into detail, but they discuss these benefits:

• Web standards give you a more powerful web site
• Web standards give you reduced maintenance costs
• Web standards give you accessibility (for screen readers for the vision impaired, etc.)

We’ve been in the web industry for a while. We’ve taken over plenty of projects that were created too cheaply up front and ended up costing their owners more in maintenance, headaches, and lost reputation than if they had been built with quality as a priority from the start. We realize we cost more than most firms; we’re the first to admit it. At least now you know why: it’s because we take a long-term view.

Remember, a web presence, like a building, can only be as strong as its foundation. It’s worth making sure the foundation is solid.