I went to an informal small business mentoring group the other day as Deb's guest. There were 20 odd people there, some were genuine small business owners, some were thinly disguised "salesmen". There were lots of different professions represented; a printer, an accountant, a photographer, life coaches, several insurance agents, a finance advisor/mortgage broker, a GNLD reseller and a web designer who made a big spiel about building websites to showcase what the customer does, not what the web designer does. After I came home I had a look at her site and the links to sites she has created and now understand fully why she said what she did - her coding is abysmal.

And therein lies the problem; no longer is web design and web development considered a skill. Now anyone can pick up a piece of WYSIWYG software and create their very own 'masterpiece' (and even do the same for others) and call themselves a "web designer" without any apparent knowledge of the under-pinnings of web development. It doesn't matter that it is non compliant, poorly laid out, badly coded, structurally unsound and generally not fit for the web, it's out there.

But there is a huge difference in making your very own hobby site and designing a site for someone else that looks and acts like a dogs breakfast, and when a webby has to put a disclaimer like this "Sorry to the 1.5% of users on Netscape - you will have to scroll down instead of using the links" on a site, they should go back to bed and read some books like "Web Building for Dummies", then sign up for some real classes that teach the importance of the basics. AND cross-browser compatibility.

It doesn't matter how long people have "been in the business", if they aren't doing it right, they aren't on the ball and having attended a school of IT somewhere doesn't mean their training is in the area that they are currently working, or that they were actually any good in the first place. I could have done my whole 4 years training and never gone near a web module and still say I was qualified to do what I do. Luckily, all the things I do do use the skills I was taught during those years and are backed up by the modules I took as part of the solid quals I hold, even if all the Merit passes I have don't necessarily mean a lot to those who have no concept of the work involved in rolling out a steady 95% plus pass rate.

Of course, it's really easy to build sites that work reasonably well in Internet Explorer because it's the browser least likely to be interested in standards compliance as developed and promoted by the WC3 whose standards we, as web designers and developers should all be attempting to faithfully follow, but that is no excuse for building any structural part of any site that is not usable in any of the other major browsers, especially considering the variety of platforms that potential users (and of course, potential customers if it's business-driven) might be running.



The site in question has been written for only 63.9% of the potential viewing audience (as of July '06) and, like the rest of the 25% Firefox users alone, I am not one of them because it's not just Netscape users she has failed to accomodate properly, its FireFox as well. And Opera; oops, there goes another 1.4% of viewers.

My blog runs pretty much in line with those very figures:


In the end, if you want a good site, pay a professional; if it doesn't matter what your site looks and performs like or who can use it as intended, buy a bag of peanuts and hire yourself a monkey. There are loads out there to choose from.