[thelist] developer ethics?

Tara Cleveland tara at taracleveland.com
Tue Mar 5 14:05:00 CST 2002


> My $0.02US.  If it doesnt' directly involve you or
> your corporation...why the hell do you care?
>  By pointing out errors, you gain nothing but animosity
> from the contractor (who btw works in your field,
> something you don't want).  The corporation isn't
> going to pay you and neither is the contractor.

I care because it's my industry. If we all circle the wagons and refuse to
say when a site has major problems, then the whole industry will lose
credibility. From the client's perspective, coding a site by themselves with
Front Page might be preferable to spending $3000 on a site that isn't any
better than they could do themselves. Or, if they spent $500,000 on a site
that doesn't follow standards that they set and isn't a fabulous site, they
could decide to build a team in-house instead of contracting it out. So why
would they ever hire a designer or web design company? Most companies
(especially small companies) have no idea what is involved in creating web
sites and don't understand why their site isn't as good as ABC company's web
site, they want to hire someone that can tell them and make their site a
good site like their competitor's.

I'm willing to risk the animosity of someone who doesn't care about their
client's interests and isn't willing to learn from their mistakes.

> If the contractor wants to design a crappy site and
> the biz is ok with it (whether by choice or
> ignorance), that is their problem, not yours.

Well if they know that it is crappy, and they've asked me to tell them why,
they are trying to learn and not be ignorant anymore. If I leave them in
ignorance and refuse to critique their site, they won't make a better
decision next time and their site will still be crappy.


> A good analogy would be if I see you driving 28mph in
> a 25mph zone, I should call the cops on your since you
> are violating some standard (law), not giving the
> public what they want (public wants 25mph, you are
> going 28mph), not following the clients directives
> (road==client, road states 25mph), and so forth.

No, this is a terrible analogy. We don't have any cops or "laws" in Webland.
We do have standards - but they are not enforced - there are no cops to pull
you over if you are breaking the "law". Most of the people who hire people
to create web sites don't even know standards exist. So telling clients what
the standards are and how their site doesn't follow the standards is my
responsibility - especially when they ask me to tell them.
>
> Web designers piss me off all the time with bad code,
> but that the way life works.  Unless you are offering
> to teach them or fix the problems for free, stay out
> of it.

Life doesn't have to work that way. As David Kutcher said, we *are* trying
to teach clients and hopefully other designers too. Many other professions
are self-regulated. If an individual in the profession doesn't cut the
mustard, they are penalized in some way. I'm not sure that I want to be that
harsh - but people who aren't looking after their client's interests and
creating terrible sites while representing themselves as true professionals
should learn that they will be critiqued by others and have their shoddy
work exposed. Hopefully, they will either learn how to code properly or
they'll get out of the profession. And really, if they are calling
themselves web designers, they should be responsible for ensuring that their
work is up to snuff and educating themselves on how to go about doing that
work.

> If I lived off judging other peoples works, I would
> never be happy.  In my head, unless its xhtml1.1 /
> css/ bobby validated, its bad coding.  99.9% of sites
> don't meet this.  Yet I don't call out my fellow web
> designers who validate xhtml1.0 strict.

Well, I'd probably say that's going a bit too far with the standards. I
would not judge so harshly. But judging others is a part of life. Whether it
is on the street or in the workplace we have to judge other people in order
to work with them. If you just accept crappy code from those you work with,
then you'll spend all of your time fixing it not getting any of your own
work done. So you judge their work (you've already judged it by saying that
they "piss [you] off all the time with bad code") and hopefully you'll be
nice about it and tell them how to code properly. And frankly, you can judge
by your ultimate ideal or judge by what is acceptable given the situation.
Not everything needs to be that strict.

> (who attempts to stay of others business and
> expects them to do the same)

Honestly, I am happy to have others go over my work and point out mistakes.
It's one way to learn and get better at what I do. Sometimes I can justify
doing something differently or not following standards, but if I'm just
being lazy I hope someone will call me out on it. Arbitrarily saying "your
site sucks" isn't going to help anyone, but an even-handed, fair critique of
a site should only help, not hurt.

Regards,
Tara


--
Tara Cleveland
Web Design and Consulting
http://www.taracleveland.com







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