I should have called this “Ten ways to make your web designer pull their hair out“. This is a sister post to my Ten Things Web Designers Forget.

I have a lot of respect for people that have made the jump from the traditional arena of print design and can now honestly work in the area web design. However this is a reminder to the rest of the traditional print industry that is pretending to be web designers. Stop it! You are giving designers generally a bad name.

So let’s start with a few basics you are just not getting:

How many times have you heard this: “Well the site / design / label / content has been done like this on this site, so it must be right, we’ll just copy that!”

We have all encountered it right? The premise that because someone has done it before us that is must be the correct path to take. This assumes a number of predetermine aspects:

• The site in question has the exact same budget, market and audience.
• There has been an extensive use of industry best practice and the application of user centred design principles on the site.

We all know about open source software. The seemingly endless libraries of code and applications ready to use and implement into a business environment. Now colleague Myles Eftos has been discussing the use of open source applications and there implementations of late. This debate is an old as the hills, but still from time to time it’s good to pull it out of the draw, dust it off and start the discussion off again.

Originating, in a previous life, from a development background I can understand where Myles is coming from and his passion for not having to club together and open source modified solution. However consider:

Well this week the web in a small way moved a little closer to the full semantic web as Yahoo announced it’s now indexing for the semantic web and microformats (which is really good to see).

So what is the big deal. Isn’t this semantic thing something the web standardsi have been touting for a while now. Does Yahoo finally joining in make any difference.

Well yes in a way it does, it means that Yahoo are taking the step in the correct use of semantically formated and organised information as a tool to understanding the context of the information that is being indexed.