Its Your Blog So Do What You Want
Friday, November 30th, 2007
I’ll keep this post simple because it confuses some people. In my view there are two types of website - the personal one where we blog and interact AND the commercial sector, services and government environments. To me these are fundamentally different whether I’m thinking about accessibility or simply the quality of design.
Its your blog so do what you want with it. How’s that for a t-shirt slogan? If you want to do it and if your social circle dictates you can rock your socks off with pictures of vodka bottles, loud intrusive music and little flashing animated gifs in the frequency range of photosensitive epilepsy. That’s not my concern. If I go to your blog its for information and because I’m into the same world view. I am aware I will never get every drunk college student to become undrunk and not post that rubbish on the web.
In other words just as you don’t require a wheelchair ramp from your split level lounge room to your kitchen its the same with your ‘play page’. Helter Skelter your little heart out for all I care. NOTE [added later]: I said for all I care. Why? Because I can’t bash you up with a book and force your hands to be perfect web robots. And I don’t want to have a web that is so rigidly anal as to force-feed conformity across the board. Who would ever bother to communicate if we had to be perfect the day we made our first web page?
What does matter: If you are a business. If you are selling a product or providing a service or in any way financed or serving the taxpayers and citizens of your country THEN I happen to think you should be providing best quality solutions. They should be well designed and not create barriers to your users (accessibility), they should be intuitive and easily navigable by people other than yourselves (usability), and they should do so in such a way that the interface is not only aesthetically attractive but also functionally appropriate.
The caveat being - if your blog is a business blog, a service blog or a government / corporate blog of any kind then you fall into the second category. Best practice is something I would expect.
