Are you working in a web company as a developer or a designer. If you are ... think for a second on what you are developing/designing ... whether you put your attention to web standards and final touches.

A website for a customer is a face to his company or in this case a face to my project. As the supplier if you screw things up at the end it's going to look really bad on the customer. unfortunately most companies don't understand about web standards and importance of getting the site done according to the web standards. and the development house makes an advantage . However if the customer is well knowledgeable on the web standards, its going to be hell for the supplier because he wont be able to play their bullshit game anymore.

Couple of weeks ago I hired a vendor to develop a website for a project which I'm planning to launch here @ Microsoft. I decided to select this vendor due their profile, quality of work and recommendations. Personally I too was happy with their quality. I wont mention their name here beause this is not to point any fingers at them. I have already quality of the stuff delivered seemed amazingly crap.

• Absolutely no web standards were followed. Halfway through I had to give them a lecture on the web standards hoping they will get a feel of the quality I'm expecting. but very dissapointly there were no improvement ... or very little improvements.
• Another thing is trying to do things in the same old way we used to do 5-6 years ago. Developers who worked on this project has absolutely no clue about the enhancement in ASP.NET during last 5 years. Initially I didn’t understand the reason for the delays because as i see some were very simple things to be implemented. When I looked at the source code all became very clear.
• Consistency of pages with the rest of the pages ... I don't even want to talk about. Imagine you having different pages in your site in different styles … May be it is ok to have the promotional website for HELL in such a way.
• Navigation adds several extra clicks to reach a page. Scenes of usability is absolutely ZERO!

But after couple of rounds of discussions they managed to get the functionality of the site working with only few hiccups. Which is fine as it is a project and there is always room to do bug fixes. But what good of a functionality which is not following the standards and which is not user friendly.

So If you are working in a web development house as a developer or a designer and you have no clue about the web standards and best practices go and learn those. If you don’t feel like learning i think it’s better that you quit.