Re: FN-FORUM: Creating a Web Developer organisation

date posted 13th August 2007 13:20

Hi Richard,

> I certainly hoped that membership of the group would be more a status 
> symbol that we could point our clients to when touting for work 
> individually.

I know you are trying to see that membership of the group is some sort
of badge of quality, but you need to be able to promote it as a badge of
quality that paying customers will recognise, which will take a lot of
time, effort and money - ideally it would need to be adopted across the
whole industry otherwise it is completely worthless.

Savvy customers (or ones that think they are) might ask about coding to
the W3C XHTML standard or of you can create 'Bobby approved' accessible
sites (yes, I know there is no such 'standard'), but beyond that they
don't have a clue.

Also bear in mind that there are already various groups like the Guild
of web designers, or what ever it is called - looking at them some time
ago, most of them seemed to work on the basis of pay us some money and
you can stick our badge on your site and customers will love you more
because of it, oh and there are a few fringe benefits.

In reality I have never come across a client asking about
qualifications, standards, etc, in the web world you are judged on the
quality of your last work and whether the clients were happy or not.

The other thing that you need to bear in mind is that if you are setting
up a judging panel to 'approve' members, whilst they may have the skills
to produce a pretty site, know XHTML + CSS or all about accessibility,
are you also going to judge how they handle their clients, ability to
meet project deadlines, project budgets, etc - all these things are far
more important to the client than what the code looks like and also it
is something that varies over time as the individual business changes as
well as as the technologies change so you would need to do retesting.
--

Cheers,

Julian Voelcker,
Cheltenham, Glos.
T: 01285 821 910
M: 07971 540 362
MSN: [EMAIL REMOVED]
Skype: julianvoelcker