The Blind leading the Blind

If you are a professional or if you are well-educated in your industry, then you already know that people don't know what they don't know. In the 1980's when Ibuprofen first became available as an over-the-counter non-prescription drug, doctors soon had patients presenting with kidney failure induced by over-medication. Estate Attorneys frequently tell horror stories about wills that were self-written and the problem it has caused for the heirs. Real Estate professionals frequently hear stories about either buyers or sellers who have financial woes brought on by trying to negotiate a sale without any professional help.

Small Business Pipeline published an article by Scott Koegler entitled "Setting Up Your Company's First Web Site." It is obvious that Mr. Koegler either does not understand the dangers involved in even a small business website or he does not see fit to explain them clearly. (There is a disclaimer in the second paragraph but it implies that only a large website needs a professional from the start.

According to the HTML validator known as "Tidy" (developed by the W3C consortium) the page on which this article is posted contains 38 HTML errors and over 300 warnings. (Some of the errors are so blatant as to be ludicrous even for a web designer who has not kept up with changes in CSS, XHTML and XML.)

Mr. Koegler then proceeds to recommend table layout templates. In his fourth paragraph he recommends using the templates which come with several software packages and then makes this statement:

If you plan to eventually hand over the development and maintenance of your site to a professional, your best choice is to buy one of these packages and use it as your design tool right from the start.

Absolutely NOT!

If you plan to eventually hand over the development and maintenance of your site to a professional, you need to either consult with a professional regarding client collaboration tools such as Contribute 3 OR create .txt files containing the content which you plan to port to a newly designed website.

Most beginners can no more design in CSS than fly an airplane without lessons. Most packages for beginners produced bloated code which embeds archaic HTML code both excessively and redundantly on every page of the website. The result is a slow loading website that wastes bandwidth and places heavy useage loads on web hosting servers.

If you do not understand what I am talking about then remember - People don't know what they don't know.

The next ludicrous statement in Mr. Koegler's article is his list of what things the visitor should see first. PLEASE!!!!!!

First of all, many of your visitors will arrive on your website from a search or from a link which lands tham on a page other than the index.htm page.

Second, the thing that a visitor should see first is - what the visitor was seeking when he or she arrived. It is not about what you want to say to the visitor, rather it is about what the visitor WANTS to learn from you. If you don't know why the chicken crossed the road, then you better find out! And when you do find out, place that on your site's main page! (Peter Merholtz wrote an essay earlier this week on empowering the user instead of trying to control the user.)

There are so many things wrong with this article that I could write a book! If you want to learn how to produce professional websites then you need to be reading Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, 37 Signals, Zen Garden, Al Sparber and Project Seven, Jakob Nielsen, Steve Krug, and Owen Briggs. You also need an elementary understanding of the W3C consortium's standards although you may not achieve a flawless validation. (I still use proprietary tags (IE and NN) in my body declaration to improve browser degradability.)

If you don't have time to study these authors' writings and digest what they teach, then don't ask a web designer professional to build on top of a table based layout. Expect the professional to start from scratch to produce an efficient and professional business website.