Should Marketing departments have basic HTML skills?
- by Phil.Wheeler
Working within an organisation as part of the in-house site development team, a lot of my team's throughput is driven by the colouring-in (marketing) department. It is their responsibility to provide approved content and imagery for the features or enhancements that we include on each iteration of the company site.
One thing I've noticed in this job and several previous ones is that the Marketing department is extremely particular about wording and presentation, but has little to no understanding of the actual medium with which they're working - the web.
I find that my team is constantly making best guesses for various HTML attributes like image alt text, titles, rel tags, blockquote cite attributes and the like. How reasonable is it to expect that marketing departments have a strong understanding of the purpose of HTML metadata? Should it be the developer's job to remind and inform each time or are marketing departments falling behind the technology they're working with?
What could I reasonably expect our marketing department to understand and provide every time with each new work request?
