The Hardest Thing for Web Designers/Developers

Yep, I finally did it. No one is as critical of web designers or developers as themselves when it comes to making or remodeling their own website. When I attended the Savannah College of Art and Design I was required to take classes such as Life Drawing and Sculpture in which each class member would have to display each projects’ homework in class before a jury of their classmates to receive constructive criticism. That was painful. It was also an extremely practical method of motivating class members to try their best and to learn the use of tact in offering their criticisms.

To add to the level of nervousness or dread, at a school like SCAD you are invariably taking these courses alongside some of the best new artists in the country and even the world. What I learned from them is that the opinion of your own work rarely has any objective connection to how good it is. Some of those kids were simply the best but that didn’t prevent them from having a fear of criticism and avoiding classes sometimes at the expense of their grades to avoid a jury of peers, peers who would have given them rave reviews for their exemplary work.

What does this have to do with my new website? The web is the biggest jury there is. It’s also mostly not your peers who will be judging your work, so you have to use non-subjective ways to reduce the number of things people can complain about. These tools are called Web Standards and Usability. These are very wide and deep topics as well as moving targets because the technologies involved change daily. Still, when we use the web we expect to see certain conventions used in the navigation of a site, the presentation of the text and the usability of the content. This is one of the languages that any successful web designer/developer must speak.

This website’s search engine visibility and ranking will benefit from new content being added like blog posts, recent portfolio pieces and whatever else I can think of. The modern web, Web 2.0 and beyond is a place where you cannot sit still and leave your web site static. It will disappear from the search engines. My competitors and yours will be constantly adding new and more relevant content to position their sites before our customers. Check back here to get articles, tips, tricks and things you should just plain know about getting your website to perform and maintain its best search engine ranking.