Tabless Design is an Excuse to Raise Rates

Of course there are many web professionals that will honestly and fairly detail the pros and cons of how they build a site.  Furthermore, they will reflect the amount of work in their fees.  However, there is a significant subset of designers and developers that use tabless/W3C compliancy jargon to make their proposal sound ultra official, hopefully enhance their “professional appearnence”,  and raise their price. 

It seems that tableless is becoming the only unique identifier for these groups.  Typically it’s wrapped up in a lot of technical speak that puts down any other way of building a site.  I tend to look at it as a bogus value proposition.  Rather than talking about turn around time, value add services, prices, or long term benefits to having a business relationship, they laud tableless design as the end all in site creation.  If a designer or developer harps on tableless or W3C compliance and doesn’t cover many other issues beware.  There’s a good chance they are trying to make themselves appear as one of a limited group of people offering this service.

The good news is that many designers and firms are beginning to use tableless and W3C compliant code.  Using it a unique identifier will likely disappear over the next few years.

Tableless Design and Code Compliancy Won’t Help Site Conversions

Most companies and organizations wouldn’t be content with just having a site.  Many people settle for that, but it isn’t their ideal situation.  Most people want to generate revenue or some kind of action item from their site.  Tableless design does nothing to promote that.  It’s an exercise in clean code and to some extent, accessibility.  That by itself won’t create any conversions on a website.

My rule of thumb is to make tableless or W3C compliant code on the “nice to have” list.  Priority should be placed on meeting business or organizational goals.  Put resources in place to ensure people can locate your site and have clear direction to convert to your desired next step.  If resources are left, then it’s time to explore ideal ways to build the site.  Make sure the end goal is met before moving on to secondary preferences.