The true benefits of XHTML for the client

Eric's recent post regarding the savings in moving to a standards driven design contains a great paragraph:

What they will see, though, is a faster site. Suppose I said I could sell you a product that would make your Web site twice as fast as it is today. How much would that be worth? [?] even for a small business trying to sell its products online and distinguish itself from competitors, a 2x speed booster would probably be worth buying.

It's worth stating this again. Whilst we can point to improved flexibility, maintainability and development costs, these are really developer benefits. When presented with a solution, the client generally doesn't care what was used or how the solution was achieved as long as the product met their needs. When we go out to buy a fridge, we generally aren't interested in the mechanics of the system, regardless of how architecturally clean or well designed it is. However, we do care about the fridge having lower running costs, operating frost-free and fitting in our kitchen.

Similarly, the client can instantly grasp the significance of some of the other benefits of semantic HTML/XHTML:

• The site will be X% faster in loading
  Eric said it perfectly. Once the client hears the words "we can make your page load twice as fast", you'll be hearing a whoosh as they reach for their cheque book. Abstracting out presentational information into CSS such as font and colour information means that the page size will be reduced as you remove the duplication of information. What's more, the css file will cached by the client and reused for each page load.
• The redesign will save us $X a year
  When Doug presented a redesign of Microsoft, he found out that it would save 329 terabytes of bandwidth a year. Whilst obviously that was a special case, it does show how cleaner markup can provide actual noticible bandwidth savings which translate into monetry savings.
• More people will be able to access the site
  Semantic HTML/XHTML pages are generally more accessible. More accessible to vision impaired readers, more accessible to people with non Wintel hardware which includes not only platforms such as Macs and Linux Systems, but also smartphones and PDAs. What's make's this even important is that many of the people using such platforms are also likely to be "early adopters" and "trend-setters". They have disposable income, are willing to try out new products and are vocal members of the community. Even if that is taken out of the equation, the basic rule is that the more people that are able to visit a usable version of your site, the more prospective customers with positive impressions.
• The site will be easier to maintain and turn around
  OK, so I guess what I said earlier wasn't true; maintainability is important but not in the way it is usually presented. The client generally doesn't care about the ease of development. However, they do care when you say that we can turn around new changes and add features/redesign sections faster. For the customer, those are the gains that are meaningful.

Whenever someone pays for a service, whether it is a fridge or a website, they are looking for a product which satisfies some need or deficit; that is they are seeking to gain an increase in utility. The important thing to realise is that the needs of the customer is different from that of the developer. It is only by correctly identifying what the client wants that you can begin to provide a solution.