Standards-compliant Engineering/Manufacturing Sites

On company in our group is looking at getting their rather basic website
redeveloped externally.

In typical fashion, they have declared that this project it 'marketing-led'
rather than 'IT-led', which basically means they I would be awkward and
would insist that things are done properly, so they are bypassing us...

We do have some input in the project, but my colleagues and I are hoping to
hold a veto over the selection of a supplier based on some sound, basic
development principles. In addition, we want to show them some example sites
that do a reasonable job of producing cross-browser, standards-compliant and
accessible pages.

We need these to be real world companies, ideally our competitors or peers.
The management response will be 'everyone else does it this way'; we want to
be able to say 'no, your competitors are doing it right!'. I'm digging up
information to justify standards-compliance, accessibility etc.. but these
real worls examples will have a greater effect than the theory on my myopic
colleagues.

So any reasonably good commercial websites out there? European/UK
manufacturing companies would be ideal.

Needless to say, I'm looking at the sites of companies that we have many
dealings with, but there are a few good apples, but still far more rotten
ones...

Thanks

Chris

[apologies for the cross-posting if you think it is excessive]

CJM wrote:

So any reasonably good commercial websites out there? European/UK
manufacturing companies would be ideal.

You could look at <http://www.w3csites.com/>. Unfortunately the sites
submitted there are not organized by category, and most of them seem to
be personal sites, so it might take a bit of time to find commercial
sites you consider useful.

And of course there's the usual suspects:
<http://abcnews.go.com/>
<http://espn.com/>
<http://wired.com/>

They're all not quite standards compliant, as everybody knows, but
they're pretty good nevertheless.


Matthias
--
Swiss Blogs:
http://www.blog.ch/
Bloggertreffen 19.03.2005 in Basel:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/alex/Bloggertreffen_2005

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 12:40:50 -0000, "CJM" <cjmwork (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

On company in our group is looking at getting their rather basic website
redeveloped externally.

Do you _really_ care if your company has a good or bad website ? Is
this a decision that might cost _you_ your job, or cause the whole
company to fold ?

If not, then let the damn fools go right ahead and shoot themselves in
the foot. It's not your company, it's not your responsibility to make
the company act sensibly. Trying to fix things here is a quick route
to making yourself unpopular, and it doesn't even change anything.
Marketing is _always_ right, because they don't even understand the
question to realise they might be wrong.

--
Smert' spamionam

"Andy Dingley" <dingbat (AT) codesmiths (DOT) com> wrote

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 12:40:50 -0000, "CJM" <cjmwork (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

On company in our group is looking at getting their rather basic website
redeveloped externally.

Do you _really_ care if your company has a good or bad website ? Is
this a decision that might cost _you_ your job, or cause the whole
company to fold ?

If not, then let the damn fools go right ahead and shoot themselves in
the foot. It's not your company, it's not your responsibility to make
the company act sensibly. Trying to fix things here is a quick route
to making yourself unpopular, and it doesn't even change anything.
Marketing is _always_ right, because they don't even understand the
question to realise they might be wrong.

I've decided that I'm going to arm them with enough information to encourage
them to make the right decision, or at least to look into it further.

If they listen to us... great; If not, then it's their hard luck - but at
least they can't claim ignorance later on. "Nobody told us..."

Chris