The Pandemic of Web Mediocrity
As a web stadardista you’ve broken from the old school spacer gifs, table layouts and short-sighted practises of the late 1990’s. After all, modern browsers now support a superior baseline of technologies. We have good support across the board for CSS 2 and DOM 1. We also have WCAG. The inconsistencies have become smaller (even in Internet Explorer) and our knowledge about front end coding techniques have brought us to a point where finding the answer to bugs can be as simple as asking our old friend Google. There are more good resources out there with easier to find solutions.
We have also accepted, as standardistas, that we need to approach our skillset with professionalism. We spend untold hours reading studies and reports and books on subjects as varied as broader technology, web technologies, user interaction (psychology, design, sociology, etcetera), business marketing, information architecture, usability, accessibility and much much more. As standardistas we find the need to look into how these fields interact. At how users interact. At how web technologies can be made to a level of professionalism that probably 98 percent of websites today are still not held to. We are interested in far more than whether or not IE users see the corporate logo!
We are definately not mediocre in our work, ambition or drive to educate this industry. And, let’s call a spade a spade, those web companies selling sub-standard solutions are robbing their clients of the quality they deserve. That their clients’ customers deserve.
As standardistas I’m sure Seth Godin’s post this week about the forces of mediocrity (or the forces for mediocrity) should sound very familiar. I read a lot of Seth’s work and highly recommend it - a lot of what we do is marketing. I’m marketing right now.
Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths… whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over.Seth Godin
What probably annoys me most about the forces of mediocrity are their establishment within our industry as power-bases. Especially within government (but definately not limited to it). One government IT Manager last year was overheard to say that I take the web too seriously. While another manager in the same area directly told me what local businesses need is to go to American web companies and get a site for US$1,000. Those companies can provide a talking head on the clients site (actually this talking head solution was SitePal) that can read out the FAQ page! I sat there thinking are you shitting me?
SitePal is, in my opinion, an obtrusive and annoying gimmick. The manager then went on to quote a friend’s business went to a 12 per cent conversion rate almost instantly. Sorry if I didn’t believe that, by the way. My word of wisdom there is a bad interface design, bad information architecture, or simply bad business idea will not be saved by a talking head.
And if the criticism of my skillset is that I take the web too seriously then it makes me cringe at their mental model of their own careers or responsibilities. Because to them the web is a triviality right? That 10,000 page site delivered as a service to the public? Trivial? I take my work as professionally as other highly skilled people. No more and no less. I definately do not have an interest degraded to the level of a local pizza shop dishwasher!
Does it at all strike you as odd that within our industry it is the normal experience for these organisations to employ many talented programmers to work on expensive and highly complex enterprise solutions but consider the front end delivery a triviality? That someone in a position of power can honestly say real users need a talking head on their site but accessibility and usability are just trivialities? The forces of mediocrity are out there alright.
My interest in web standards and interface design comes directly from my interest in people and human nature. I was actually a writer before becoming a programmer. My poetry, in particular, placed well in two out of the three state and national competitions I put myself into on the one week I ever bothered to enter anything. Then my interest progressed to design and to human computer interaction (thus accessibility and usability). Then to business and marketing. The interest grows instead of shrinks.
Meanwhile out there mediocre people celebrate their mediocrity. They defend it against all threats, new ideas and reasonable argument. They don’t want to hear about studies they might have to read or better techniques to achieve their objectives. And you’ll hear that catch-cry of the mediocre web developer at ever turn they make. That catch-cry is a banner of the mediocre on the battlefield of web development.
The mediocre catch-cry goes - But it works doesn’t it?”
It actually doesn’t you sausage. It doesn’t. That’s our friggen point!
