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Note: This is not directly CakePHP / PHP related, but I'd appreciate your comments anyway ; ).

Well, you probably all know a couple of reasons why layouts shouldn't be done with tables, why websites should pass the validator, and why html should be semantic in general.

But be honest to yourself, which one of them would impress a potential client? Very few of them. Most clients won't care how your HTML (CSS, JS, PHP, MYSQL, ...) looks like, as long as the website does what he or she wants.

So my question is: what would you tell a client (i.e. a non web-technology-savy person) to make him pay you additional money to pay attention to web standards?

One thing up front, I saw people / companies advertise web standards work with the argument that it's cheaper, but my personal experience has been, that making a difficult layout work in IE 5.5+, Firefox 1.x+, Opera, Safari (and maybe more) can be really time consuming compared to an table version of it. But now, I have to agree, that once it's done, working with it is easier and faster. But would you really use it as a reason?