Joey Hoer

Seven Dirty Secrets of Web Development

https://medium.com/google-design/10-ux-trends-at-google-6cac31deaea5

Do less. The number one recommendation I consistently made was, “Do Less.” That means fewer images, fewer form fields, fewer complicated navigation patterns, fewer plugins, fewer 3rd party pixels, fewer walls of text, fewer full screen overlays, fewer render blocking js, fewer clicks… fewer ways to distract your user from their goals.

  1. We are still learning
  2. Your site needs maintenance
  3. We don’t know what’s best for your users
  4. Your site will will expire
  5. Site launch will likely decrease traffic and conversions
  6. Your site is only as good as your substance
  7. Time based billing is good for us and bad for you
  8. It’s okay to throw it away

Success is a result of hard-work a great product

  1. Sites are designed to be relevant for 3-6 years.
  2. Launching a new site/design will likely decrease traffic & conversions
  3. Technical debt accrues over time
    • Build an internal team. It’s better to buy than rent, if you’re working with an outside agency, you’re paying too much. Your goal should be to build an internal development team.
  4. There is no secret sauce
    • Invest money into your product and your team, paying for clicks doesn’t make people want your product, building an amazing product makes people want your product. A great product can overcome technical hurdles.
  5. Price does not equal Time

We are still learning

How do you measure experience? Personally, I believe the number of projects a developer is exposed to is a better indicator of their skill than the number of years they’ve been in the industry. Exposure to a variety of problems, particularly real-world support issues, allows a developer to grow. How many websites do you think a person has to build before they are a “good” developer? An expert? Before they have learned everything there is to know about building websites?

As of writing, I’ve been fortunate enough to have had direct involvement in the online success of over 40 different brands. Some of those brands held multiple web properties, allowing me to work on more than 90 different websites during my career.

I am on outlier, and I’m still learning.

Let’s do some simple math. Most of the best, most passionate, developers I know are—like myself—self taught. Nevertheless, many developers do go to college, or a trade school, so let’s suppose a developer is hired immediately after graduation. Though on-boarding can require up to three months before introducing the developer to a large build, let’s also suppose that the developer is ready to begin working on the first day. Most large project builds require 4-6 months to complete, so our developer might work on 3–4 large projects in a any given year. If that same web developer is also responsible for a handful of support clients (let’s say another 3–4 that swap out every 3–4 years), and they’re loyal to their job and stay for five years (which is about as loyal as they come in this industry), at the end of their first five years of employment they may have had exposure to 20–30 different websites.

Do you think they have learned everything there is to know about web development? Servers? Databases? Security? Performance? Design? Business? Far from it. Yes, they’ve developed a wealth of experience over the years, and when compared to a customer who has maybe, maybe been involved in one or two website builds in their life they are extremely knowledgeable, but that doesn’t mean that they know everything.

Fortunately at an agency we all get to work with other talented individuals who have experience that rounds out our own deficiencies. Our collective knowledge is far greater than that of any individual, and do you think that we as a collective know everything there is to know about web development? Not even close.

The web is constantly changing. New technologies, trends and best practices are being introduced literally every day. Each new website is the latest product of a process that is constantly evolving.

The goal of every project is to do the best work we have ever done. Every time we work on a project we gain insight into what works well, and what does not work well, and we change our process to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. That logically means that every project we build is better than the last. Yes, the next buyer is getting a “better” website than you did and they’re benefiting from all the knowledge and experience we gained while working on your site. That means two things:

  1. Work on your website is never “done”
  2. The instant your website is pushed to production, it’s outdated; similar to how a vehicle’s value depreciates when the car is “driven off the lot”

My point is, when you hire an agency, you get to leverage a spectacular amount of experience. You benefit from our knowledge of the industry and our ability to provide you with the best product, experience, and guidance that’s currently available. Generally, our experience enables us to identify bad decisions early-on in a project to yield the best possible outcomes.

…but we’re all still learning.

Your site needs maintenance

Like any property, web properties require a continued investment to maintain. At minimum the content of a website should be reviewed periodically to ensure that it is relevant to customers and well structured for search engines. The design and user experience should be audited regularly to ensure that the site is optimized for conversions, and that evolving best practices are being followed. Site speed should be measured and recorded frequently to ensure that the site loads quickly for all users. Some platforms require an additional investment to ensure infrastructure is stable and that the platform security is maintained by keeping software up-to-date. This investment is part of the “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO) of the platform, and ecommerce business owners should be aware of these costs before embarking on a new project.

As new trends evolve, your website will begin to show it’s age. Design trends that shift overtime may be the most visible evidence that a site is aging, but missing features which users come to expect over time, can also indicate a site has not been well maintained.

If you want your site to remain relevant and operate at peak efficiency, you must make an ongoing investment in maintaining your site’s design, feature set, and marketing efforts.

Warning: Do not sign onto a large web project without understanding the TCO (total cost of ownership).

Your site will expire

Generally, a website will be relevant for 3-6 years. You can extend the lifetime of your site by making an ongoing investment into regular maintenance, but even with consistent upkeep, eventually you will need to rebuild your site. Typically a rebuild is required as a result of significant changes in technology, but this can also be due to positive business growth, when the system can no longer support your business needs, or when industry design trends have shifted so radically that building a new site is more economical than updating the existing site.

Your site is only as good as it’s substance

Marketing won’t fix bad design. Design won’t fix bad technology. Technology won’t fix a bad product. Focus on building up the core elements of your buisness first. Develop a great product and offer it at a reasonable price. If you don’t believe in your product, no one else will. That’s step 1.

Snacking

As a partner and consultant to the ecommerce businesses I’ve worked with, I’ve seen a lot of boondoggles. A boondoggle is a wasteful project which gives the appearance of having value. This practice seems to be extremely common in client-side ecommerce; as ecommerce managers are placed under increasing pressure to drive sales, they turn to technology that they often do not fully understand. The worst offenders make decisions in isolation, without consulting their agency partners. Rather than strategically planning projects that would drive results, they bounce from one technology solution to another, never making any real progress. Almost always in these situations, technology isn’t the answer to driving more sales, but technology is the easiest way to demonstrate progress to a superior. Inevitably, this approach leads to frustration when solutions don’t meet business goals; when asked, the ecommerce manager assigns blame to the agency, for the agency allowed this to happen, leading to a widening gap of distrust.

Can we improve things without building anything?

Digital build projects have a habit of starting life as little more than an idea that quickly becomes an inevitability … We reach for digital build projects as solutions because they are actually easier than dealing with the underlying problems—i.e. why we are failing to meet users needs and organization goals.

– Liam King Net Magazine, Issue 288, January 2017 Page 30

In my experience, the least successful engagements are the ones in which the client fails to cede, or share, the decision making process with their agency partner. It is the professional’s responsibility, as a trusted advisor, to protect their client’s interests by preventing them from making mistakes. Taking orders at face-value, without first understanding the business motivations behind a request and without then providing an educated professional recommendation, almost always leads to a poor outcome for both the client and the agency.

See the Pen Good, Fast, Cheap—Pick two by Joey Hoer (joeyhoer).

High Impact Low Impact Low Effort High Effort

Unfolding the Fold

When discussing web design, I often hear clients refer to “the fold.” Generally there is some important element that they would like displayed prominently on a page, and they will request that the element is placed “above the fold.” As a frontend developer experienced in responsive web design, knowing that viewpoint sizes vary greatly, this concept of the fold is difficult to grasp. When we say “the fold”, what exactly are we referring to? How can we respectfully share our expertise with clients to arrive at a common understanding of how the fold applies to modern web design?

Unfold the mysteries of "the fold"

Cron-ology: Schedule Tasks Using Cron

It is often useful to schedule tasks (i.e. jobs, processes) to occur at regular intervals. Perhaps you need to backup a database every night, pull the latest updates from a popular git repository, sync data between multiple systems, or punch a time-clock. Maybe you need to let your colleagues know you’ve got a hangover, or you have a coffee addiction. On *nix systems, anything you can run from the command line can be scheduled with cron.

Start scheduling tasks with `cron`
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