The Web: The Rules Are Different Here

Tonight we’re enjoying our first fire of the season in our fireplace. It’s quite a cheery little blaze.

The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire.

Years ago, there was a tourism campaign — I think it was sponsored by the Florida Tourism Bureau or some-such quasi-governmental agency. The tagline was “Florida: The Rules Are Different Here.”

That campaign was pretty lame, and it was widely ridiculed and lampooned. This was during the 1980s drug-running heyday, and the “Rules” tourism campaign came to be associated with that. But the message about different rules could be applied to website development. “The Web: The Rules Are Different Here.”

I frequently see sites — and am sometimes asked by new clients for re-designs of sites — that were obviously designed/developed/coded by someone with a background in print design who hasn’t yet learned that the rules are different here.

They use huge graphics that take forever to load. They use rigid, inflexible designs that fall apart when you resize the text in your browser, or when you have a browser window that’s larger or smaller than the window the designer tested in when developing the site. They use drag-and-drop WYSINWYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get) software programs that write code that’s invalid, that displays improperly in some browsers, and that often makes use of javascript or Flash buttons for links — making those all-important links invisible to the search engines.

They don’t understand that the web is not a fixed canvas, like paper. They don’t understand that some of the most important types of visitors are search engines, which are essentially deaf and blind users with browsers that have neither Flash nor Javascript.

Many — probably most — print designers are perfectly capable of learning the “rules of the web” and how it’s different from print work. But all too many of them don’t.