What if Sitepoint hosted an apprentice-type competition where Sitepoint users could create a business plan and develop it over 1 year?

We could see a culmination of business plans and assess which ones really went well at the end of the year. It could also serve as motivation for those of us who are trying to “work hard in 2006″ to work even harder. The competitive spirit usually brings that out in people.

Would anybody be up for this? Perhaps Sitepoint might be willing to donate a prize package of books for the grand prize.

I’m bringing up both issues with my developer to see what his problem is.

Don’t be too hard on the guy. (And maybe apologize if you’ve already raked him over the coals! ;) ) I’m for valid code myself, but there ARE valid reasons to use tables and some other types of code that are normally frowned upon by the web standards crowd (I include myself in that group). One excellent reason for using tables, for instance, is that they’re the only way to get a site to look the same for older browsers as it does for modern browsers.

A standards-compliant, CSS layout normally means your visitors on Version 4 browsers and lower will get an unstyled page that looks like an internal page from useit.com. Readable, sure, but definitely not attractive.

Thanks for your impressions about the two photos. I have asked my web designer to remove the double photos where they appear.

Good advice!

Now let’s see if this move sells more books or gets more calls to come my way.

Andrew

Thanks for the comments. Honestly I’m not so web savvy and have to confess this is the first I’ve heard about standards. I also appreciate the post that checked out how many errors there are with the coding. I’m bringing up both issues with my developer to see what his problem is.

I’ll be sure to ask for standards-based pages in future.

At the same time, my goal right now is to learn as much as I can about the viability of these sites at the lowest cost. If they can be profitable with “spaghetti code” then I imagine they can be even more profitable with great code.

But anyway, I sure appreciate your advice.

Andrew

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d take a profitable non-compliant site over a unprofitable compliant one any day, and I’d bet that most business owners would too.

I don’t think these are the only two choices. I think it’s best (and completely possible) to have a profitable standards compliant site. I know this is off topic, but anyone creating web sites should care about it. Like I said, it’s good for SEO, in fact, I think it’s the most beneficial, cheap, and easy thing you can do for SEO. There’s your business (non-technical) argument. Also, can you easily port this table-based site to PDAs and cell phones? No. Is it future compatible? No. You’ll have to rewrite all this code in the next few years anyhow.

I guess it’s just frustrating that our industry tends to be so divisive with these things. Why can’t we have business-savvy professionals that understand marketing as well as how to properly code a site. Folks seem to specialize in one or the other, then trash the other side. In my opinion, to be most successful, you should be well-rounded on both sides, or hire someone that complements your skillset to help you.

Stupid analogy, but I don’t want to hire a car mechanic that doesn’t know how to fix my actual engine, but he washes and polishes the outside, then does a little tap dance and hands me a lollipop as I shyly giggle and say “aw shucks”. Yeah, that was dumb, but kind of funny.

Can you go into some more details of your intitial testing methodologies of whether or not you think a concept will work (eg. how much time you give a site to test, setting goals for the site to know whether or not it “passed” the test, etc.)

Thanks in advance,

Ted

What I am curious about is how many people are working on/with you for these projects? Based on past blog posts I know you’ve got quite a few sites. I’m running quite a few myself, and its virtually impossible for me to give my “A game” to anymore than one at a time.