It seems to me that many times style guides or other standards are written without much thought about how they will get implemented. In my opinion, standards should be architected and not simply defined. In fact, I would go further and say that a standard shouldn't even be defined if you haven't figured out a way of implementing it.
As a way of grounding your discussion of standards, you could start with an inventory of the pervasiveness of your standards. For instance, how many of your standards are defined? How many of those are only implemented for a portion of your site? How many are consistent across your entire web presence (see the standards architecture mini-report for more levels)?
Let's assume you find some standards that aren't yet consistent across your entire web presence. For those, you can then look at whether those standards are:
- understood
- agreed upon, and
- easy for the content contributor or site owner to implement.
If any of these three things aren't in place, then it's easy to see why the standard is not being implemented consistently. The key is to match the ease from the content contributor's perspective with how it is implemented in the system. For instance, if you have standards around how tables are supposed to display but it is difficult for the content contributor to pull it off, then the tool should allow the content owner to more easily meet the standard or you have the burden of extra training.
