New Year's Resolutions
Jan 10, 2007It’s 2007, and I have decided to come up with a few resolutions on my journey to becoming a better web designer and developer.
I Will Not Be Seduced By Design Trends and Fads
I subscribe a few feeds like Webcreme that post nice looking websites. It’s a pretty good way to keep tabs on what’s going on in the world of web design and get new ideas for layouts and graphical elements that look good. The only problem is that everything has started to look the same. One to two column layouts inundated with gradients, pastels, starbursts, etc, etc.
This all felt new and fresh when people first started using them, and sites like Flickr and 37Signals still use them well. But once the band wagon gets to full it almost seems to hurt your site if you don’t use these web design elements extremely effectively.
I Will Continue to Focus on Design with a Purpose
A site’s design should reflect the purpose and goals of the site. Too many sites have small fonts just to suit their layouts (I find myself constantly hitting command-plus in Safari). This is especially annoying in blogs, whose sole purpose to for people to read what you are writing.
(Information Architects should be one of the gold standards that blogs aspire to from a design perspective.)
Many graphic design portfolios do great job of showcasing talent, but forget to make it easy to contact the artist in order to hire them.
I think it is important to remember that many people are looking to have a question answered or problem solved when they visit your site, and are extremely forgiving of bland designs as long as they can get what they came for. Craig’s List is a perfect example. Simple design, insanely popular.
I Will Not Get Complacent About Developing My Skills
There are times when I start to feel good about my current skill set and take my eyes off the horizon and just keep doing what I’ve been doing without trying to stretch my abilities. As a software developer this will eventually relegate you to maintaining legacy systems. That is just painful as far as I’m concerned.
Ruby on Rails 1.2 is coming up quickly, and I was starting to feel proud about getting really comfortable with the everything that was in 1.1. My goal is not to ignore ActiveResource and see if works for me.
Javascript obviously isn’t going anywhere, and I know many developers who ignore it because sometimes it feels like a weird throw-away language that applies only to web browsers. I think it would benefit us all to at least learn more about the DOM and some of the fun things you can do to manipulate it without writing a single line of HTML.
I Will Remember that Software is about People, not Code
Code is great, it either works or it doesn’t. It doesn’t whine, change its mind on a whim, or make illogical requests. People do all of these things, and it’s tempting to sometimes just go hide behind the monitor.
Time to continue to get out from behind the desk and remember that one of the hardest parts of software development is understanding the people who will actually use the software and are the only reason we get to enjoy our fairly comfortable professions instead of being forced outside to dig trenches.