Is your website performing as expected? Are you committed to making it better?

Web publishers, like myself, often promote best practices: design with web standards; think like a publisher; develop a content strategy; make your site accessible, usable, and SEO friendly. Most advocates talk from experience, which makes the advice more meaningful. After all, practice makes perfect (or at the very least, better).

However, I was recently reminded that “saying and doing” are very different. It’s important to recognize this so you can take necessary steps to support best practices as a discipline, not just a topic of discussion.

A colleague of mine shared a moment when he had been communicating a rationale for best practices. The person responded with a nod and said, “Yes, yes, that’s all well and good, but best practices are not real world.” Instead of regarding best practices as a practical discipline, the person viewed them as ideal or “preferred” strategies.

In web publishing the opposition to best practices often arises when people are faced with the need to build or update a website quickly. They might say we don’t have time for best practices or we don’t have the resources to do it the right way right now. This thinking leads people to discount best practices as rhetoric that doesn’t deserve real time or commitment. Others see it as a struggle between theory and practice, when in fact it is not theory, it is practice.

"Real world" truth

In the “real world” customers don’t forgive businesses for bad websites.

The challenges of managing time constraints and heavy workloads are understandable, but this means you need to make a choice: you either support best practices to plan, develop and maintain your website, or you do things "quick and dirty." But if you choose the latter, don’t expect to accomplish your goals quickly or make the process easier long-term, because those outcomes are the result of best practices.

For example, quickly adding webpages without consideration for page titles and descriptions, semantic markup, and web content keywords has huge implications on findability (SEO) and usability. You may solve the immediate need of publishing information, but does that meet your goal if people can’t find and access it?

Businesses frequently claim to recognize the importance of best practices in web publishing. This is illuminated by their awareness of and increased need for web publishing specialists, such as information architects, user experience designers, content strategists, and web writers. However, many of these same businesses still can’t appreciate it as an actual discipline, exemplified by web professionals often having to defend the very roles for which they are hired.

Talking about best practices is not enough

In response to my post Content First: Step One in Web Marketing where I make the case for content related to best practices, Amanda VanLente-Hatter commented:

My current position was created solely to have someone to create [web content], but I find I’m still having the discussion you describe [convincing people of the need for content].

In this instance, the need for a web writer implies support of best practices, but the employer still does not fully appreciate the value of effective web content. There’s a big difference between saying content is needed and actually making content a priority.

Make a better website (support best practices)

Best practices are hard to follow. This is why there are so many bad websites. But if you’re committed to doing better, you have to follow through and support the discipline. Best practices are not simple or easy, but they are worthwhile.

Rather than try to solve the problem of enforcing best practices in a blog post, I want to open the topic for discussion. Whether you’re someone charged with supporting best practices or someone who feels the responsibility to effectively meet goals, what is your perception of best practices? What role do they play—or should they play—in your organization?