As a college student I spent a semester at the Sea Education Association (S.E.A.) which included six weeks at sea on board the SSV Corwith Cramer, a 134 foot brigantine schooner. It was one of those experiences that has affected the way I look at everything I have done ever since. Web design is no exception.
If I had referred to the Cramer as a “boat” during my cruise, I would have been tossed overboard. The Cramer is most definitely a ship, but for the sake of my metaphor I will be loose with my nautical terms. The point I am trying to make is that when you are at sea, your vessel, be it a boat or a ship, is your entire world. You have a destination, but you can’t simply set a course and forget about it. You must constantly check your position, adjust for currents, watch the weather, and stay away from what sailors call the “hard edges.”
Your business has a destination, But it is rarely a straight line to get there. You set sail with your website and you had better be ready when the wind changes direction or you will quickly go off course and possibly run aground.
How do you prepare a website to weather the storm and stay on course? It begins with the foundation. Sloppy code, taking short cuts, and falling for the latest gimmicks will cause a site to break when viewed on older browsers, and possibly not work at all on new devices. Your Flash interface may look great on a 27 inch cinema display, but how does it look on a two inch cell phone? These are the “hard edges” that can easily sink an unsuspecting navigator. Complying with standards ensures your site will be available to the greatest number of users on whatever devices they use to browse the Internet now and in the future.
Does this mean scaling back, losing those rollovers, and forgetting about the Flash animation? On the contrary. Today’s websites are built with distinct presentation and content layers. The content is your message (or your products, or your brand). This is the cargo that you must deliver safely. An interface which falls to pieces when a certain plugin is not present is a complete disaster. A properly maintained vessel can detect this, gracefully hide the unresponsive media, and get the content through.
Just in case my overwrought metaphors have left you at sea, here it is one time in plain language: The main purpose of your website is to get your message out there to your audience. Don’t let sloppy coding stand in the way of letting that happen.
