Tips for the Unscrupulous Web Developer, Part 1: Code

Note: For those not as famil­iar with irony, this series of posts is intented to use humor to illus­trate impor­tant points about get­ting a web­site that works for them, and the poten­tial pit­falls along the way. —ed.

One thing you fig­ure out pretty early on in the web biz: You don’t really have to know how to code web pages all that well.

All those peo­ple who talk about web stan­dards, CSS lay­out, and build­ing sites for effi­cient updat­ing, blah blah blah—that’s not stuff that’s going to get you a hun­dred dol­lars today, and it’s not stuff you should worry about. Your mechanic doesn’t tell you what’s going on under the hood, and your small busi­ness client’s not going to ask you what’s going on under­neath the hood of their web­site either.

Believe me: The vast major­ity of small biz clients who want a web­site, just want it now, and the last thing they want you to worry about is learn­ing about “best prac­tices,” “usabil­ity”, stuff like that. Just get in, get out, and get on to your next web­site. Duh!

What I’m try­ing to say here, is, most small busi­nesses know next to noth­ing about what it really takes to build a good website—one that will last over time, give them what they truly need, and match their real busi­ness objectives.

And that’s where you come in: Since they know so lit­tle, your not know­ing a lot, or keep­ing up with stan­dards in the indus­try, that’s really not that big a deal.

Sure, over time, the next web designer that works on your code might be a lit­tle frus­trated because you laid the entire site out using tables (the web wun­derkind of design for 1999).

Sure, it might take them three times as long to make a change to your HTML. But what I’m say­ing here, is: Your client is never going to fig­ure this out, so you may as well do it the old fash­ioned way, and save all that pre­cious learn­ing time, which you could more prof­itably spend… churn­ing out some more websites!

Sure, out­putting your client’s 20-page site as a series of sta­tic HTML files might not seem very effi­cient to the effete “web pro­fes­sional” who has to make a tiny change in all 20 of those files later on. I can just see the poor sap whin­ing to the client—“but the rea­son this is tak­ing so long is because the code wasn’t archi­tected well.” (They love using big words like “archi­tected!”) Wah, wah, wah.

Mean­while, you’ll be on to some­one else’s site, and they’ll be toil­ing away. What’s it to them, any­way? They can just charge the client more to make the changes, because it’ll take so much longer! It’s a win win for every­body! Well… almost every­body!

*

Last year, my wife and I had a con­trac­tor come out to our house and add an extra room. He seemed like a nice guy, and since I know noth­ing about build­ing stuff, I just pretty much trusted him. He worked and worked, and said, “that’ll be $xx,xxx.00″. Fine, and we paid him. I found him through a friend of a friend of my wife’s uncle, and we went with him because he offered us the cheap­est price by far!

And what’s wrong with that!?

I am won­der­ing what the strange smell com­ing from our new room is, and if you look at it from a cer­tain angle, I bet you’ll notice that it doesn’t quite “line up” with the rest of the house.

But … so what?

• The Busi­ness Value of Web Stan­dards (Adap­tive Path)
• The Busi­ness Case for Web Standards-Based Devel­op­ment (Nav­i­ga­tion Arts)
• Why Tables for Lay­out is Stu­pid (Sey­bold, 2003)