Here’s a simple test. Does it bother you that a Java “Hello World” program, is 2 meg, minimum? That’s about 2K in Python. When was the last time you went to a new version because you wanted to get a copy of it for free, or you wanted your resume to have the latest version? How much human factors psychology do you have? It is an insult to think you just know that as much as thinking that structural engineering is something that you can just pick up on the side. And when you redesign a site, do you look at the web traffic from the old page to see how to design and where to put the links? Of course not. You put them where you think they belong. How often does the user have to stop thinking about the problem s(he) is solving to work the tool? Finally, is it a page of code, or is there a central metaphor that leverages how the end user thinks? Do you know how the end user thinks, or do you not care, because they’re all stupid?

Yeah, I’ve got an attitude akin to the author’s. The first C programs I ever wrote where notepad, calculator and paintbrush for Windows 1. Have you yet used anything with that kind of central metaphor? 26 years on, I’m not very impressed with the state of the profession. IT has become a blank cheque, and best practices are a personal discipline to be pursued if there is time and money. Maybe.

You know what they say, admitting you have a problem is the first step…hehe. But really, everyone is a sucky web designer when they first start out, so just keep learning!

Also, I’d recommend that you join our web design forum. This will allow you to get honest feedback from other designers and developers about your work, and what you can do to improve it!

http://www.thewebsqueeze.com/forum/register.html

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

Jacob

Glad you enjoyed the article, hope you stick around!

The horizontal scroll bar has been bugging me lately. So many sites have one, and the worst part is that it’s usually only a few pixels and there’s nothing there but a blank space, a drop shadow, or some other nonsense.

People have to remember just because they have a dual 24″ widescreen setup doesn’t mean everyone does.

I used one example on my rant on horizontal scroll bars. The screen capture was from a well funded site but I didn’t want to mention any names.

It seems to be very bad with Blogger templates too.

I however, respectfully disagree. I was writing this article for web designers. My definition of a web designer is a person who creates web sites. Usually a web designer only designs the look of the web page and hands it over to the web developer. But more and more, a web designer “DESIGNS” in the traditional sense, which includes building the structure as well as just designing the look of it. Plus, I like the title of the article…hehe!

As I said to some of the above people, if I included everything it would be a list of 1 million things that make you a sucky designer. I included the ones that I thought were most important!

Thanks for reading!

What about considering accessibility? Colour schemes and screen resolutions? You haven’t really looked at cross-browser compatibility or ensuring your websites work for non-visual browsers. Are you scripts running unobtrusively? How about ensuring your font-sizes render correctly across the board? Oh and of course it’s always worth mentioning the ol’ valid XHTML and CSS bit.

Then you could be really picky and also question the copy on a page, use of imagery (also make sure you have the rights to the imagery), what about basic SEO practices?

I’m not digging at your post, there are some good points. However you cannot judge whether someone is a good designer or not by the 10 points up there alone.

Nathan

Well take it from me, sure your clients are happy, and you are as well…until something happens! Contracts are to cover you, and your client.

That’s great to here Ben! You should join our forum we’d be glad to help you learn….plus it’s free!

Thanks for reading!

It appears the designer read this article…LOL! The text on the website is now text instead of an image, and almost none of the links work! At least he’s working on it!

Thanks for reading Kurt!

I went to your friend’s flash site and noticed right away that the layout broke in Firefox. Opened it in Explorer and it looked fine. I find this a common problem I have but in the other direction. Because I prefer Firefox and Firebug for developing sites, testing the site in Explorer is usually the last thing I do – if I remember. And quite often there is something unexpected that happens that messes up my design.

Also most of the links on the menu bar appear broken. There is no reason for this. This designer should be ashamed. If there is more to the project that is being developed links to these pages should not included until these pages exist.

And now for a compliment – The site is attractive.

Jacob

Although I haven’t proven it, I would wager that if two such versions of a site existed, and one gets visited or linked to more than the other – either one – then that one would end up ranking higher.

You might ask how the inferior one would get visited more if has a lower ranking, but the thing that developers sometimes forget is that being found in search engines is not the only way that a site gets popular. There’s also word of mouth, client referrals, social networking, directory listings and so on.

In theory, a table-based site is at a disadvantage initially for being listed, but just because a site is not properly built and optimized doesn’t mean that it will never be ranked highly in a search engine. There are plenty of sites that break all these rules and still rank highly, because at the end of the day, if the public likes them, so does Google.

I disagree. In my experience if you are build a website with proper web standards…separating your presentation from your documents structure you will rank higher then the website built with tables. Let’s use logic, your code to content ratio is improved dramatically. Combine that with headings (, ..etc.) and titles that contain your keywords and you’ll do just fine.

Give it a shot….

Build two websites, one table based, and one css/xhtml and see who wins on the rankings.

I realize that tables are for tabular data and not for layout. I’ve been following that principle for about five years now.

I’m just saying that designers (or developers or whatever) shouldn’t be led to believe that if their site is not table-based they will automatically rank higher in search engines than those that are. In my experience, that precept is [sadly] near the bottom of the list of things you should do to get noticed by search engines.

Many sites rank highly despite table-based layouts. Amazon.com is table-based, is full of embedded and inline styles, mixes structure with presentation and behaviour, and generates 1,845 errors when you try to validate it.

I would love it if these best practices were guarantees for high ranking, but the truth is, traffic and cross-linking is king with search engines.