Best Practices

It’s easy to overlook the importance of budgeting your time because it seems so simple. You feel like you instinctively know whether or not you have enough time to do a project this week, this month, or at all. In the beginning as your practice is growing, you’ll almost always be right. Sometimes you may find yourself sitting on your hands waiting for work to do. But the word of mouth about your design work starts growing, and eventually you get more and more people calling on you. If you’re anything like me, you suddenly find that you have committed to do two weeks worth of work in the next few days.

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• Practical, Entry-Level Web Accessibility - Accessibility isn’t an all or nothing game. Taking small steps toward textbook accessibility is worth doing.
• Web Design Contracts: Why Bother - A good outline of why freelancers need contracts and what they should contain.
• I Wish I Had Written This - If you aren’t familiar with the NO!SPEC project, then this is a must read.

Most visitors to a web page will only see how it is displayed in their browser of choice. They don’t know (or care) how the code that generates that page appears. So why should we as developers care? Because we’ve been told it’s the right thing to do? Well, okay, I guess. If I’m going to spend the extra time required to write clean code, though; I’d like to know a good reason why. (In this post, I refer to clean code and optimized code interchangeably.)

Maybe I should start by asking what constitutes optimized code? I usually think of it as code that is executed quickly. It should use the least number of lines necessary to accomplish the task and be relatively easy to read and maintain. In practical terms optimizing your code usually involves removing any unnecessary fluff and organizing what’s left into an easily understandable format.

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It seems like all of my web design customers these days are demanding content management systems (CMS). They don’t come right out and say that’s what they need, of course. They talk about how they want to be able to add things to their web site without the hassle of contacting me or any other designer for every little change. They want their web site to be a tool they can use to improve their business. They want a web designer to give them a site that isn’t going to be filled with old and irrelevant information six months from now. I can’t say I blame them.

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I always get excited when Andy Rutledge posts a “redux”. He looks at a poorly designed site from a recognizable company that should have someone on staff who knows better. He outlines a few of the problems and then creates an example of how he would design the site better. This time around he takes on CarMax.com.

I made a decision this week to add Google ads to the blog. There are a couple reasons for doing this. The most obvious was to monetize my efforts in writing with a step that is very easy to implement and maintain. I wanted something that wasn’t going to take a lot of time now or in the future.

The second reason is to have some first hand experience using the Google AdWords interface. It’s been several years since I’ve actively used it. Google traditionally creates fairly intuitive UI’s with clean design. Looking at things that are simple and effective is great inspiration for my own design.

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For my money, a standardista in the web design arena is someone who will let nothing stand in the way of having perfectly compliant code. It should strictly validate as HTML (or XHTML). Any CSS files should also validate. If the customer wants or would benefit from a feature that can’t be accomplished in a standards-compliant manner, than the standardista will refuse to create it. Sort of flies in the face of the customer-is-always-right school of thought, doesn’t it?

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