Common Novice Web Developer Mistakes
Sometimes you find a merely great post, and sometimes you find a post that makes you want to whoop, “Preach it from the rooftops, brother!” Sitepoint has one such post recently, about the 10 Common Mistakes Made by Novice Web Developers. It’s worth a read, a bookmark, and a good study later.
It might help to understand these mistakes if we ask why people make them. So a few nibbles we can add on the edges there:
“Have you avoided learning HTML? Sorry – you’re not a web developer.” – There’s really no nice way to put it – we blame laziness for this mentality. Kids, if you’re going to work in a computing technology field, you cannot escape learning and working. Design will never be paint-by-numbers. Type! Type, type, type, type, type, type! Press shift, angle-bracket, type the ‘em’ tag for emphasis, shift again and closing angle-bracket. There, was that so hard? Exercise your little pinkie-pinkies – we can do pushups on ours!
Lazy browser testing – While this is a bad problem, we still can’t blame people too hard for this. Websites that automatically give you previews of a URL in multiple browsers have to run in a server-farm, so they’re expensive, slow, and prone to break which is why we aren’t inking one now. It’s expensive to maintain several machines just to have a broad browser testing base. It’s even more difficult to anticipate everything. People might view your site on a Nintendo DS! Or a weird wide-screen monitor! Or a projection TV! And probably on toasters and watches next!
Brushing off bandwidth – This is an easy mistake to make. Web development is a geeky trade after all; the developer is likely to pay for a top-tier connection and a high-performance machine. Then they forget that granny user at home doesn’t have this super-turbo setup.
Scorning SEO – Well, no wonder. 100,000 snake oil salesmen have risen to give SEO an undeserved bad name! Nevertheless, as he says, 90% of everything you can do for SEO is dead-simple obvious.
Strongest Memes of 2010 (So Far).
A key part of marketing to the web is knowing what your audience is thinking. This is basic to any marketing, really. Consider a television commercial for beer. It might be a funny commercial. Fosters (we’re sorry to bring them up) advertises in America with a series called “How to speak Australian” featuring jokes based on colliding perceptions. The point is, they wouldn’t be funny if they didn’t know something about the target audience and how they think.
So, without further ado:
- Keyboard cat – Example here. A cat that plays the organ. With help. Everybody thinks it’s hilarious. Usage: “Play him off, Keyboard Cat!”
- Chatroulette – Site here. Chat Roulette matches you up randomly with another visitor, and both of you interact through webcams and text chat. Crazy shenanigans occur here daily.
- Triforce – This is a mystic symbol originally from the Nintendo “Legend of Zelda” games. It has become a meme after it was discovered that one could enter some Unicode characters to compose a similar symbol, but it’s easy to get wrong. So being able to “triforce” is a sign that you’re an expert user. Usage: “Newbies can’t triforce!”
- tl;dr – It’s stronger than ever. “tl;dr” stands for “too long; didn’t read” and is the canonical response to any long ramble of text in a forum. Users are now including the summarized version at the end of a long story. Usage: “Does anyone have the tl;dr version?”
- Look At My Horse – This one is not safe for work! Basically there’s a viral Flash cartoon out there called “Amazing Horse” which is this year’s hot web obsession. Be warned, it is tasteless and vulgar.
- Death Note – A manga (Japanese comic book series). Rapidly becoming the greatest dramatic manga series ever made. Death Note is about a shinigami (Japanese angel of death) who drops his notebook on Earth just to see what will happen. The book has the power to cause the death of anybody whose name you write in it! An A+ student picks it up and decides to use it to fight crime, but the power goes to his head and it becomes a battle of wits between him and the world. It gets even crazier from there! Hugely popular everywhere.
There they are! Use them how you see fit in your next ad campaign.
And If That Bing Don’t Sing, Mama’s Going To Buy You A Diamond Ring
Oh, goody! Slashdot recently gave us all a treat, when they posted an explanation of why their Bing search engine fails. We’re happy because the other shoe has dropped; we have our inevitable postmortem, and we can now return our attention to the one important search engine and leave the other stragglers for second-rate consideration.
Quote:
“For Microsoft, focusing on the head instead of the long tail meant that it returned queries for popular sites and failed to serve queries with smaller, lesser known resources online.”
Oooooh, yes, the long tail! In Internet marketing, the long tail has become a buzzword of mythical proportions. But in this case, it kind of sounds like a threadbare excuse. Several commenters on Slashdot have pegged it much closer to what sounds like the truth by consensus:
- Too little, too late. Google beat everybody, and that’s all there is to it.
- Microsoft doesn’t have enough trust in this sphere.
- Clumsy interface. Google got simple, and nothing beats simple.
- Microsoft doesn’t have MapReduce. That’s the secret sauce, there!
- An out-of-touch corporate bureaucracy. The MSN team controlled the design, and rode it into the ground.
BlogHer and the Female Web Entrepreneur
Interesting coverage of the BlogHer 5-year anniversary, where they take a look back at where women in blogging are now.
“Where are the women in tech?” is a huge blog-buzz topic lately. It’s interesting, because you have to wonder what’s so special about technology that it must have 50/50 sexual representation? You don’t see front-page stories asking “Where are the female auto mechanics, construction workers, pest exterminators?” For that matter, where are the male needle-pointers, doll collectors, scrap-bookers, and midwives?
The answer is, they’re all right here. They just don’t always think to call attention to themselves. In fact, studies continue to show that there are more women online than men! Yes, it’s true! But – we’ll carefully edge out on our limb here – they don’t always hang out in the same places.
Go to a World-of-Warcraft forum or the latest geek flamewar on Slashdot, and you’ll usually find men. Women tend to cluster more than men do, because it’s more important to them to keep social connections. Thus, they tend to have a stronger distribution in closer-knit communities – places like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, and LiveJournal.
It’s kind of like a bunch of guys on a Quake server saying “Where’s the female gamers?” Well, female gamers are playing The Sims; most Sims gamers are female. Also, the Nintendo Wii pulls in 80% of female gamers. Why is this so hard to figure out?
Web Design – Adobe v HTML5
The story of the Internet has always been a battle between the old guard corporations and the new guard users.
So, Microsoft has had to battle against Free and Open Source software, IBM had to battle against the PC clones, Apple had to battle against the PC, proprietary Unix had to battle against BSDs, and so on. remember DEC? The Digital Equipment Corporation once ruled the computing world with the PDP and the VAX throughout the 1970s. But time goes by and progress marches on.
What’s bizarre is that corporations don’t seem to learn from history. Adobe, which has already had to fight for its survival when the free image-editor Gimp has risen to challenge Adobe’s flagship cash cow Photoshop, now finds itself at odds over its second most-lucrative business, Flash. HTML5 is coming, inevitably, and there’s very little that Adobe’s proprietary Flash platform can do that HTML5′s canvas element can’t.
Ajaxian covers the whole story better than most. It’s funny that Adobe felt the need to have a seat at the W3C standards table in the first place. But anyway, the prevailing wisdom is that Adobe has been blocking HTML5′s standardization right and left, a charge which they adamantly deny.
In fact, HTML5 aims to reduce the need for all proprietary plug-ins, be they Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apache Pivot, or Sun JavaFX. Interestingly, the HTML5 editors are Ian Hickson of Google, Inc. and David Hyatt of Apple, Inc. Hmmmm, can we think of two companies which have locked horns with Adobe in the past?
Peter Brittain
Web Design Perth
Web Design – Bet You Learn Something From This Javascript Article
While Smashing Magazine is usually content to post lists about visual design, when they decide to roll up their sleeves and get into the code, they really make a post you can believe in. Here’s The Seven Deadly Sins Of JavaScript Implementation.
There’s something here even for experienced scripters. For instance in Sin #1, it never occurs to most of us to protect global variables in a self-contained Javascript code snippet – we write and test it in a page by itself. But put two of these scripts on the same page, and they might play havoc with each other! We wonder how many buggy webpages there are out there suffering from this.
Another great example is Sin #5, where we’re unnecessarily mixing together PHP and Javascript, forgetting that we need to make it easy for future maintainers to edit in one language without breaking the other. We’ve seen scripts that had PHP generating Javascript to generate HTML and CSS all together in a tangled mess, and it’s ugly. It also makes changing it like running through a minefield.
Peter Brittain
Web Design Perth
Web Design – Wannabes Are The Cancer That Kills Everything
Our favorite blogger who specializes in the human side of technology, Jeff Atwood, has brought to light the distressing story of how many candidates who show up for programming job interviews can’t program. He, and many of the comments appended, marvel at this phenomena.
But it’s not so surprising, when you stop and think about it. They’re wannabe “hackers”.
Nobody wanted to be a hacker at first. Then trashy movies like “War Games” and “Hackers” came out, and people got the idea that hackers get to have sex with Angelina Jolie and start their own nuclear wars, so hence must be “cool.”
It’s a phenomenon older than civilization itself. It’s the same mentality that leads people to call themselves “geek” because they saw “Star Wars,” or call themselves “gangsta” because they wear their baseball cap backwards, or call themselves “bikers” because they wear a leather jacket, or call themselves “bi,” “poly,” or “kinky” because that’s the kind of porn they download.
Here’s a key to telling if you’re a wannabe: If you’d never heard of the “hacker” subculture, would you still be interested in writing computer programs? Because natural members of a subculture or lifestyle have the tendency first, then wander the Earth thinking of themselves as a misfit until they discover that there are other like them. Then they fall with relief into that culture or lifestyle, saying “at last I’ve found my place!” If this is you, then you’re not a wannabe.
But: If it never occurred to you to be interested in what makes computers work, until you first heard the world “hacker” and got curious and then saw some hacker culture and thought it looked and sounded cool and then you started calling yourself a “hacker” and got more into it until, perhaps even in the future, it finally comes to your attention that at the center of this subculture is the career of programming computers. If this is you, we have some bad news for you…
Peter Brittain
Web Design – RIP IE6
We never thought we’d be typing this in our lifetimes, but it looks like everyone’s finally serious about killing off Internet Explorer 6. YouTube should be pulling the plug on IE6 support about now.
They’re giving IE6 a very nice funeral. Many web developers, who have had over eight years of torture trying to design for the thing, will probably say “nicer than it deserves.”
Also, we have one site campaigning to bring IE6 down and another one begging to save IE6. What do you want to bet, they’re both run by the same outfit?
The problem is, how to convince the last diehard users to upgrade? Only 6% of web traffic is IE6. As we have seen, large companies with vast stretches of cubicle maze are often the most conservative computer users around. They plug in a Windows box, and as long as it still lights up, they aren’t upgrading. Scripts like this one are the best we can do to help it along. Some IT workers have posted to forums lately asking how they can explain to their manager that they have to upgrade.
How about this? “You want look at keyboard TV. But keyboard TV no work. Why no work? Got to make new magic. Old magic too old. New magic make keyboard TV work again. Old magic all use up. Use clicky blob thing to hit this blue word. Blue word make new magic.”
Too long?
Peter Brittain
Why The 17-Year Flaw in Microsoft Windows Is Dead Serious
In case you didn’t catch the buzz going around, the story of how an ancient Windows flaw was found after 17 years is pretty-well explained at the Inquirer. The news was particularly shocking because it was a simple hole that has been in existence since Windows 3.1 all the way up to the latest Windows 7! That’s a serious bug.
Quite a few commenters on that site and others have down-played the vulnerability, saying things like “Meh, who uses 16-bit anyway?” Which goes to show that the home user doesn’t think like a hacker. Guess what? Most of the programs to exploit Windows security holes are 17 years old, too! In fact, if you were a hacker (we know, the correct word is “cracker,” but English is changing) downloading security-cracking software, you’d have more of a real problem getting updated software than you would getting legacy software.
Old software never dies in the hacker/cracker community. In fact, it goes back to the pre-Windows era, from BBS and IRC systems and Usenet archives. Back then it was covered under the blanket term ‘warez,’ and you could find vulnerability scanners, packet sniffers, rootkits, viruses, worms, and key loggers free for the download – complete with instructions! This stuff gets passed from generation to generation. There’s no doubt that a lot of it exploited DOS.
If you’re a corporate IT admin with Windows boxes under your charge, you should be taking this with top-priority seriousness.
Hmmmm, Good Advice For Being A Good Client…
We jumped when we saw the title of this post: How to be a good client, but then when we read the content, it wasn’t what we had in mind. Don’t get us wrong, it’s all good advice, but we’d really like to take this time to advise readers on how to get the most out of hiring an online freelance web designer:
1. Link to an example of what you want. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can talk to a designer all day, “I want an arty header and a side link bank, but it should move with the scrollwheel and have green and blue colors…” That can still be interpreted 100 different ways. Find a picture to start with, then detail how you want it different.
2. Take the designer’s / developer’s word for it. We don’t know how many clients out there have made their own lives miserable by saying “I want the whole site in Flash.” or “Can I get it with animated GIFs and use this big image as the background?” You hire an expert; if they say that something isn’t a good idea, listen to them. That’s what you’re paying them for is to know their stuff!
3. Be clear about your purpose. You need to detail what you’re going for in a business model. Something like “We sell lady’s dresses, so we want a site with a virtual wardrobe where they can try on different styles, a section with articles about fashion tips, and a social photo sharing section where customers can upload photos showing how hot they look in our outfits.” The virtual wardrobe helps buying decisions (sell lady’s dresses), the articles draw search traffic (bring ladies to buy dresses), the photo-sharing part encourages customers to come back (so they buy more dresses). Each part of the site should make some kind of business sense.
Things like that… readers, do you have any more ideas?