Aarron Walter

An Event Apart is a brilliantly inspiring conference series crafted by Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer that provides attendees with a deeper understanding of web standards and emerging best practices in web design and development. They’ve recently published the schedule and list of speakers for 2008, and I’m happy to say I’ll be sharing the stage with Zeldman, Meyer, and a host of Web luminaries in New Orleans.

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South By Southwest, the coolest Web conference on the planet that takes place annually in Austin, TX, has let loose it’s panel picker. Rather than creating a schedule of discussion panels and presentations that may not interest conference goers, the SXSW organizers have devised a democratic way for people to vote on what they want to hear discussed.

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It can be a tough task trying to convince your boss that the company or department should adopt Web Standards when building projects. Change is often seen as time consuming, inconvenient, tedious, expensive, and not worth the effort. Chances are that if you are trying to make the case to follow Web Standards to your boss by arguing from the “moral high ground” by saying “it’s the right thing to do”, you are not going to have much success. If you want to make real change in the industry, you have to speak to the bottom line: Profit.

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I have been recording some of the stories of my students in the Interactive Media Design department at The Art Institute of Atlanta and how they are introducing their employers to Web Standards. The project is called The Web Standards Documentary Project. Our program has been teaching Web Standards since 2002. Throughout the curriculum students learn the benefits of separating formating from structure, building pages with semantic markup, and following Accessibility guidelines. Many of our students have made some significant changes in the industry, and in some cases have successfully converted their organizations to following Web Standards, sometimes teaching courses to their entire team.

It’s not always all smiles and giggles, though. Sometimes students make the case to their employers for using Web Standards, and they are met with significant opposition. I see the stories of failure as important as the stories of success, as it indicates to us what is really causing the slow adoption in the industry. In some situations, we can teach our students how to overcome the opposition by appealing to the business’s bottom line. There are some situations, though, where it’s very difficult to convince an employer that making the change is in their best interest, as the immediate financial costs may be prohibitive.

If you are one of my students, or an alumnus of our program and you have a story to share, positive, negative, or otherwise, please get in touch with me so I can record your story. If you are no longer in Atlanta, I can record you via Skype. If you are an educator teaching Web Standards at your school, I’d love to hear from you too. Perhaps this endeavor could become a larger repository of stories of change.

Listen to the Web Standards Documentary Project stories.

I have had the pleasure of teaching many bright, talented students as a faculty member in the Interactive Media Design department at The Art Institute of Atlanta, many of whom have influenced companies and organizations in the industry to adopt Web Standards.  I am attempting to document this influence upon the web design industry by recording the stories of as many current students or alumni I can who have a story to share about the conversion they helped bring about. If you have helped an organization of any size adopt Web Standards, I want to interview you and record your story. If you are not in Atlanta, we can schedule an online interview via Skype. I hope to compile these stories to be published here and shared with influential members of the web community (to be announced should the project go well), along with a link to your portfolio site. If you are willing and able to participate, please drop me a line.