10 (ish) Do’s and Don’ts of Web Design/Development
Just really something I’ve been noticing as I read tutorials for my new application I’m developing, the 10 (ish) things I see most (PHP) coders doing, which they shouldn’t in Web Dev/Design.
1. Flash is Evil, designed as a competitor to the web, not to be used on it. Try HTML5 for Video.
2. Don’t rely on external libraries to load your page, such as javascript/jquery, prototype, flash/actionscript, mootools, or any other libraries. If a user has Javascript disabled, your web page should still display fine.
3. In addition to the above, if you do use javascript extensively to display content (you really shouldn’t), please for the love of any omnipotent being, don’t use a Hashbang in your url’s. It’s horrible.
4. Don’t use <table> or <font> tags. They’re deprecated for a reason, in 1999 it was fine to use tables to lay out your content, but since the advent of CSS, it’s often easier now to use divs and classes, or even HTML5 Elements combined with CSS. (Switch To HTML5) The same can be said for adding styling to your text.
5. Don’t use <style>. It’s horrible practise. For a development site just to see how it looks and to tweak, it’s perfect, but in a production site it’s not really an option unless all other options are unavailable.
6. Don’t make your navigation cluttered. This one is more web design rather than web development. People need to be able to navigate your site without needing a phD in computing. If an 8 year old can find the “log in” link after less than a minute, you’re good.
7. Add a search feature. If someone can’t find something on your site, and there is no “Search” box, you’ve just lost a visitor. If all of your visitors are potential customers, then you just lost money. If you don’t know how to code, it’s easy, Google offers a free embeddable search engine for your website with CSE.
8. Don’t rely on images to display your most important content. I see web hosting companies doing this mostly, some text, then their price as an image. Your price is the most important part of the page, and if you display it as an image, someone with a slow connection will possibly not see it.
9. Don’t make a crap web design, simple as that. Don’t use excessive bright colours, Don’t use a million and one different fonts, no comic sans for the love of god, try to keep it uniform throughout. People like consistency.
10. Don’t spam it up with ads! If you have a sidebar, use it for content, not advertisements.
11a. PHP: Don’t use shorthand. It’s the same as styling using the <style> tag. <?= ?> tags only save a tiny bit of typing, so don’t be lazy, do it right.
11b. PHP OOP: Don’t edit the core controller!! If all of your controllers extend “Controller”, please don’t edit “Controller”.. Any errors you make in that file are passed to all the Controllers extending that class, and it makes debugging a pain. Please don’t tell users to edit the core “Controller” class if you’re writing a tutorial, it’s horrendously irresponsible.
In conclusion, just think it out before you do it, consider the implications of putting that there, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, I suggest you learn before trying to put a website/Web Design together. Paint and Notepad a web designer does not make.
Coding with Cake
Note, to the usual user, this is a very boring entry. If you’re not interested in coding, php or frameworks I suggest you close the tab now.
So.. I’ve been researching PHP frameworks and such, as everyone says I should use one and that they would never dream of coding a whole web-application with bare-bones procedural PHP.. I looked into symfony – too complex, I looked into Zend, and didn’t really like it, and finally settled on CakePHP.
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We did it! 50k hits in 4 months!
It was only a few months back that I started thinking of HTML5. I realised the if I was to be serious about using it, I needed a base to work from, and so came mikeylicio.us/html5 – a simple framework for myself to work from.
After seeing this, someone mentioned to me that it would be awesome if they could “pick and choose” options, it would be awesome. So I set about doing just that, and SwitchToHTML5 was born.
In the four months since it’s inception, switchtohtml5 has been tweeted by SmashingMagazine (if you’re reading, thanks, I love you guys 
), reviewed by makeuseof.com (thanks to you guys too) and many other sites too numerous to mention, but I google the sites name often, and I notice each and every one of you.
I tweeted in early January that I aimed to get 50k hits by the end of January, , and you haven’t disappointed me. So a big thank you to everyone who has used the site, tweeted, retweeted, emailed and anything else.
Figured I’d just say.
Looking back, my 2010
You know, at the beginning of 2010, the first few seconds of this year I was at a New Years Eve party, and the chant from all the drunken people there was “Twenty Ten, we start again”. Looking back over at 2010 in review, what I personally have done, I don’t think that I’ve achieved just that, but I don’t think I would’ve been happy had I “started again” anyhow.
I’ve learnt so much coding wise this year, made existing friendships stronger, and made brand new friends. Failed college again, made lots of websites, had a lot of happy clients.
What exactly did I do on the web in 2010?
Some epic partnerships: We made kwn.me, we made baa.nu (still for sale btw, send me a mail), we became experts in everything ‘short’ 
. We found out about XenForo via their facebook page and we started and prepared XenFans to do what it has continually been doing, outperforming the rest. We worked on the framework which powers failpic.info, as well as a lot of other coding help questions and answers via our numerous caturday skype calls (mainly me asking for help, Floris and Chris helping)
I made SocialSig.me which most people on XenForo.com liked, I made SwitchToHTML5.com which has been open around 2 months and has had 25k+ visitors in that time. I found reddit and submitted countless wallpapers via i.mikeylicio.us. Then when I could no longer afford the cost of that site to me financially and via server resources, I closed it and released the torrent. I’ve started NUMEROUS forums, including The Geek District, Inception Forums (sold), Off Topic Hut, and more. The Rogue Forums, a place which I used to spend alot of time at was sold to wetalk. The wetalk.network was converted over to XenForo. vBulletin fucked up (more) big time with vB4, and more.
You’re still here? I’m surprised, I waffled on a lot. Here’s a video:
Anyway, I just wanted to visit and sum up some of the things I did in 2010, a sort of recap on events. I started this blog late november 2009, but I have used it the most (so far) in 2010. Hopefully I’ll use it more in 2011, and I wish any and all my readers a safe and happy new year.