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.