The Disabilty Rights Commission released a report earlier this year detailing the lack of understanding of accessibility amongst web designers and made some suggestions on how to counter this. Amongst these suggestions was…
The Government should..[snip]..promote a formal accreditation process.
This prompted a flurry of activity in the blogosphere detailing the overall findings and generating articles on the subject. The reaction to the idea of accreditation was mixed. Amongst accessibility advocates, this recommendation was mostly very favourably recieved. Amongst designers who care about web standards, it was generally accepted that this may be necessary and no bad thing and amongst non-standards advocates and non-design web professionals (such as search engine optimisation specialists) this recommendation was generally seen as unecessary and divisive.
I thought at the time that a formal accreditation for web designers was a great idea and I still do. Web design is still seen by the majority of decision-makers in business as a slightly lawless and mysterious field and designers viewed with an air of distrust. Some of this probably stems from the fact that in the old dotcom boom/bust saga a lot of designers paid no attention to responsible design and churned out beautiful, yet totally unusable web sites. Gradually, as web design as a profession has matured, designers are slowly coming around to the fact that successful web sites deal appropriately and responsibly with their visitors. However, in the business sphere, the old image of the web designer who plays on his X-Box all morning and knocks out a bit of fluff in the afternoon still holds true to a certain degree.
Its also, sadly, true to say that there were and still are a lot of bad designers out there. I’ve (rightly) got into trouble in the past for referring to these people as ‘bedroom designers’, which is misleading and unfair to those designers who do good work and yet do work out of their bedroom (or study). And yet, as soon as I used that phrase you probably had a good mental image of the type of ‘designer’ I’m talking about. I’m not going to stereotype them further.
There are bad designers out there and unfortunately, for awhile there, they were firmly in the majority. So much so that business people (who love to have meetings and ‘network’) spread the word amongst themselves about how terrible web designers were and how their new web sites didn’t do what they thought it would.
Fast forward 3 or 4 years and we now have a situation where designers are getting used to the idea that web sites need to be more than just pretty, they need to actually fulfill a function for their owners – even if that function is merely abstract rather than practical – and a large part of that is creating a site that has sound foundations. In fact, the situation has progressed so far that we’ve almost come full circle recently with leading designers saying that we’ve moved too far the other way and we should go back to letting design drive designers (in all honesty I can’t remember when this didn’t happen but thats another story). Unfortunately, the web design field is still very insular and doesn’t speak to business except in an accidental occurance and so the duckling-to-swan maturation of the web design field has largely gone unnoticed by the world of business. We’re still the X-Box playing superiors who sneer at their ideas and curse their lack of soul every time they mention ROI or the bottom line. Of course we’re not, but thats still the perception.
So whats the best way to let the world of business know that web design and web designers have changed? That we’re growing and maturing as an industry and we now understand the tools at our disposal and can apply them appropriately. Well, we can make ourselves accountable for a start and we can do that with an accreditation scheme.
Just like builders or travel agents have their bad apples, so do we. Just like them I think we need an accreditation scheme where a web designers competence can be checked. This would go a long way to restoring confidence in web design and web designers and allow business people to take heart from the fact that an accredited designer has had to demonstrate an ability in a number of concepts and skill areas. This idea is appalling and exclusionary to a lot of people and I’ve been accused of elitism many times when I’ve brought it up in the past but these people always missed the point: No one is saying that web designers have to be accredited or that non-accredited web designers couldn’t ply their trade. What I’m saying is that if a web designer wanted to become accredited then that can only be a good thing for them, their skillset, their future web sites and clients and not least good for the web as a whole and the reputation of web designers overall. Emphasis on inclusion rather than exclusion is what I’m saying.
That said, I think any accreditation process should be reasonably difficult to get. Too easy and its meaningless. So what areas should an accreditation process cover? What should a web designer be ‘tested’ on?
- Validate a web site to either XHTML or HTML 4.01 Strict
- Validate styles to either CSS 1 or 2
- Make a web site accessible to at least Priority One (A) standards
- Demonstrate an ability to work to a workflow that gives power to the client at key stages of the design process
Thats my ‘basic’ list. Thats what I’d like to see an accreditation scheme cover. It should be noted that I’m not suggesting that every web site a designer has built/will build should adhere to that criteria, more that a designer has shown they are capable of achieving that criteria. Its about giving web design back its credibility by helping business to have confidence in web designers at the end of the day, its not about a beauty contest for web sites.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Great article.
I work from home/bedroom/study whatever you will call it, yet I work with people in Scotland, Australia, all over and I am tackling some fair sized projects. I’ve also worked in an established studio headed up by the most shoddy cowboy I have ever met, whos’ only thought was money.
Being tarred with the ‘amateur’ brush just because of where I choose to work does ‘piss me off’ and if some sort of formal certificate helps break that stereotyping I am all for it.
I don’t feel it would be elitist at all, it’s just reward for people who care about and put effort into their job. I note you don’t include any specific mention of ‘graphic’ design in your four points and I think that’s important, that’s where most of the elitism occurs…
Well there ya go.
Good point about the graphic design element John. I’m not too sure how it would work though. All the other elements can be somewhat easily ‘judged’ whereas I think graphic design is a bit more ambiguous to judge in that sense.
Do you have any ideas about how it could be done?
Although I said I think Validation is unecessary on John’s Blog, I now tend to agree with you Kevin.
You have no idea how things are in India. People go an charge lots of money for a 5 page lame website which they’ve created by slicing up an image in photoshop. The companies don’t seem to mind for some reason, and person incharge of the project told me their real job is to find the ‘idiot clients’.
Though this might seem out of context in a way, but have a wild guess at how people do search engine optimization here? They just link the company’s site to their respective blogs and their friends’ blogs.
So yeah if we can cut these people out, and make the ‘idiot clients’ understand, I’m all for the accreditation process you mentioned above.
I worded that very badly indeed. What I meant was exactly as you suggest, graphic design should not be part of the criteria because at the end of the day it’s to subjective and has no bearing on the underlying quality of the site. Should web designers be forced to get some sort of certificate for their graphic abilities, I don’t think so.
I hope I’m not dating myself, but when I was going to college, the dotcom boom hadn’t even happened yet. In fact, email was even a fairly new development in the public sector. I studied electronic graphics in school, and majored in it, but my studies did not include anything web related. It was after I graduated that the internet boom really caught on. If I were to go to school now, I would have plenty of education options open to me in web design, but in my day there was nothing.
So I feel that there must be others in my situation; perfectly intelligent and able web designers who have formal design education but no degree specific to the profession we work in. I, for one, would love the chance to gain some sort of accreditation. For one, it would give bolster my credentials in the eyes of clients and employers. It would declare that I meet an industry standard, and that is a good thing. It would also give me the personal satisfaction of knowing that I am “up to par” with the things I should be. Anyone interested in purchasing services from me would be able to look at that accreditation and say, “This guy is certified in this or that.” I see it as a tool to build trust and bring validity to a profession that some businessmen don’t view with a lot of respect.
The good thing about leaving graphic design out of the equation is that such a qualification could apply to both those who term themselves web “designers” and those of us who who are more at the development end. Web developers are still very much involved in creating accessible, usable and valid websites despite the fact that our (X)HTML is more likely to be output by a PHP script or similar than uploaded directly as a file. In fact I believe that a lot of education needs to be done at that end as there are so many people struggling with accessibility and validation due to the fact that they are working with developers who are not interested in ensuring that the mark-up their systems output is valid.
Such an accreditation could be useful to standards aware designers who are needing to hire in development skills for a project, in order that they can be confident that the coder they have hired isn’t going to fill their site with font tags or unquoted attributes 🙂
“developers who are not interested in ensuring that the mark-up their systems output is valid.”
Thats a great point Rachel. I agree that something like this should be as wide open as possible. Its always struck me as strange that a lot of the developers I know get irate over a non-declared variable or some other syntax infringement in their server-side scripts yet seem quite happy to output non-standard markup!
Those whacky developers! 😉