All Those ‘Do This And Don’t Do That’ and Every ‘Top 5 Tips for Web Development’ Ever
Posted: June 19th, 2007 | Author: Ben | Filed under: Web Development |Recently I joined the StumbleUpon community and I think it’s great. At lunch when I’m at my desk or when my brain feels fried I’ll press the little green and blue button and find a page I’m going to like because of the profile I set up when I registered.
Because I’m a web developer, a lot of the time I get to these pages which offer tips about what to do and what not to do when it comes to web development and design.
It’s annoying, because a lot of the time the tips are written by an arrogant upstart with a couple of year’s experience under his/her belt. They’re written with such authority the tips are given more gravitas than they deserve.
After Stumbling, I read a tip by a Danish guy (who isn’t Jakob Neilson) that suggested users are bored of drop-down menus and users should never be given the option to view a site in Flash or HTML. If you offer a site in Flash, you really should offer an alternative HTML version too.
In a young industry, when do you become an authority on web design and development? It sure as hell isn’t when you install Wordpress on your webspace and start writing. Should you ever say to others what they should never and shouldn’t ever do?
I’ve had enough of these tips. Every time I read through these lists it makes me realise the value in going to the bookshop and buying books written by people with credentials that make their advice worthy of being in print. You shouldn’t learn everything about the Internet on the Internet, as quite often the instructions they give aren’t worth the HTML they’re written in.
Brilliant post! Odd you mention it… I actually stumbled across your site, myself!
Aye, it’s quite ironic that I came across this site by using StumbleUpon as well.
But put that aside, all of those lists, or rather most of them, as you say aren’t even worth the webspace that they take up (mostly because it’s the same list, just worded differently every time). But I don’t think that any of them really go out there and say, “you better do this or you’re doing it wrong”.
Personally I always read them as the writer’s opinion, which they are. Just opinions. They aren’t facts, ergo they shouldn’t be treated as such.
Hi Bjorn,
Quite a few of these writers do actually suggest that they’re defining ‘rules’, and in a lot of these articles they’ll say something like ‘if you’re not doing this pack your bags and start again’ (to paraphrase the article that triggered me to write this one).
I agree that the best thing to do is read these articles as opinions, not fact, but that doesn’t deter from the principle of my post which was that they should be written as an opinion in the first place and often need to lay off the ‘holier than thou’ button.