Bringing Order to Chaos

Sometimes, I believe that WWW is more an anagram for Wild, Wild West than it is for World Wide Web. Even now, fifteen years after its debut, so much of the web remains a wild frontier where standards and design conventions are given little heed.

In that fifteen years, though, a great much has been learned about what works and what doesn't work on the web. By adhering to web standards, best practices, and widely-accepted design patterns you can make your site more inviting, more user-friendly, and, in turn, more profitable.

The advantages to proper planning and up-front design work are numerous:

When you create and implement a repeatable process, time to market is shortened and project planning becomes more predictable.

When you adopt standardized design artifacts, you're able to communicate your ideas more concisely and more effectively to all of your stakeholders. Ambiguity is removed from your development process, fewer iterations are necessary to reach your goal, and rework is often eliminated.

The user experience becomes consistent, and products begin to share a similar look and feel. Ultimately, branding is reinforced, and customers are able to navigate across multiple products via a similar and familiar experience.

Soon, your customers and potential employees are seeing you as a world-class provider of products and services. And so is your competition.