Understood John. That's the world I live in every day. I work with our developers to determine what we need to do to our products:
1. To benefit existing customers.
2. To entice new customers to buy our products (because competitors are doing things also).
3. To "optimize" market acceptance/perception - Man is this one that gets our developers going People take a quick look at a product, see/read/imagine a perceived weakness or omission (maybe their buddy's a CSS programmer), skip over all the great features & then ultimately make negative posts on website reviews as to why they purchased another product and Google caches it forever!
We try to prioritize (as I'm sure you do) based on user benefit and scope of effort (1&2) - we have to deal with the $ realities of life just like you do. Only when that is done do we take account of 3. If making the change can create a marketing edge (distance us from a competitor) and also ranks high for customers then it will jump to the top of the list. Selectively it can really position a Company in the area of thought leadership and goodwill - something Xara has that many Companies are appalling at. Xara is developing functionality not bloatware which is absolutely terrific.
I suspect this h1-hx fits into 3. It looks to me like a great opportunity to bridge the gap between designers and coders and has real usability. The additional benefit is that it also dispels another potential notion that WD is for picture websites and "Susie homemaker" as its called in the US. Of course WC3 compliance is already a huge silver bullet you have on this one.Sometimes I choke on the "perception is reality" argument.
Anyway fwiw - fantastic job, both on the development and forum contribution side. Keep it up.
Bookmarks