To follow up on Jackie and Mark's comments, I adopt the What the market will bear rule. And, similarly, I spend nearly all my 'leisure' hours learning better, more efficient, more eloquent methods of both standards compliance and accessible site development.
And I don't consider charging more. I simply make my pitch and explain that as a result of my skillsets, client sites are more accessible to a greater Internet audience. Period. All the verbiage over standards and accessibility compliance is a polite curio across the business table. Provided both my and my clients' principle agendas are met - how much does it cost and what will be the likely (increase in, if an upgrade) conversion rate, and we both leave the bargaining table satisfied, I can get on with the job of delivering. Most clients don't give a damn about what goes on under the hood. They want the site to reflect their company in a professional light, meet the business model and deliver as great a return on investment as possible. What will actually determine your costings base is the volume of work - the number of active clients you have in your portfolio - and the number of working hours you are willing to pull each week, assuming you adopt a minimum income model. These are the inputs to the How much to charge equation. Alter either of these and your rate will vary, irrespective of whether you offer standards-compliant, accessible sites. But. By adopting standards-compliant development you will naturally become more proficient and skilled, i.e. faster and better equipped to deliver capable sites whose performance metrics reflect your (professional) rates. The perceived value you bring to the bargaining table will increase; you can cut a better deal. In other words, you will be judged by your work and be rewarded accordingly. You can then reduce your working hours and maintain a similar income because what you deliver works well and you charge accordingly. It's the old Return on Investment (ROI) model. Intrinsic to all but vanity sites is the need to generate traffic. This becomes fundamentally more efficient with standards-compliant accessible sites because the inherently light and slick markup makes your site more easily ingested by the search engines whose SERPs algorithms will favour well-featured semantically tight copy and reward you and your clients with better visibility on the Web. That's the primary input to the conversion game: visibility. Once a visitor hits your site accessibility kicks in. A standards-compliant, accessible site will be far 'stickier' because fewer surfers are likely to turn away in disgust or frustration; your site will work equally well in archaic browsers and on a variety of devices as it does on the latest P4 Explorer 6-based mega-depth monitor platform. And no, I'm not confusing accessibility with usability. They are different fields of expertise but both are underpinned and enhanced by standards-compliance. So, visibility brings the traffic; accessibility maintains the traffic. Visitors with physical and/or cerebral impairments (a huge market when you consider many pensioners fall into this audience) will more likely bookmark and return because the site is usable. These are the basic commonsense arguments for promoting standards-compliant and accessible development. But to return to the point: should you charge more? Yes. Because your development practices will ensure your clients earn a better ROI. In the business world that's all that matters. Mike Pepper Accessible Web Developer www.seowebsitepromotion.com ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
