A Pragmatic Approach to Developing Web Technologies & Practices

This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while now, actually probably for years, as I’ve seen various trends dip in and out of the web arena.

Of course, some have become mainstays and are now part of our web surfing expectations: I’m thinking here of Asynchronous Javascript And XML that you and i know as “AJAX”; I remember playing with Google Suggest over 6 years ago and thinking what that the speed of the callbacks to a data set was something that would really enhance the web.

And you know it has, how we search using Google now has significantly changed since Google Suggest became Instant and was rolled out to the world.

Other technologies and platforms have come to change the way we think and work too. Take social networks for example: by radically changing the propensity for sharing across the social web, marketers can now tap into and measure latent demand for products and services like they’ve never before been capable of doing.

That’s subject all of its own, maybe ill come back to that.

The point I’m trying to get to there is that we have two practices that have become part of our natural day to day web use: assisted search and social sharing.

But of course these things are used in moderation and where appropriate.

Choose wisely Padowan

Personally i feel this is the key thing: deciding where the use of technology enhances the experience or aids the achievement of a particular goal, or set thereof.

Let me throw into the mix Flash. My first foray into coding was in Flash and it’s Actionscript language and, whilst it was enjoyable work and something i’m glad i did, there is dwindling demand for it these days.

I understand its demise, yet can’t help but find myself believing that for a long time, it was the single best platform for media streaming and online game development.

It had to be, or Miniclip would never have existed and guys like the stunning Justin at Cartoonsmart wouldn’t have existed.

But, it was often used and shoe-horned into websites where it just didn’t need to be: splash pages, ott menu systems et al were thrown into sites just because the designer / developer either loved the tech, believed it was the new standard or the client wanted it because well, it was all the rage and everyone was doing it.

Again I’ll say, it had its place, its bloody good at what it’s there for but not everyone needed it.

Hit 88mph

Move forward a few years and the whole Web 2.0 movement that brought us the AJAX revolution that I lovingly mentioned above, is largely responsible for the way we expect the we to work today. It offered us interactivity that we expect from today’s websites and applications; functions and actions that we almost demand of a website.

But you wouldn’t add an AJAX driven search bar to a website displaying this simple data set:

just because you know how to make the tech search those 4 listings and display a really pretty results system. If the information is presented well and fulfills the requirements, you wouldn’t need to.

Because that’d be inappropriate and gratuitous usage of the tech with no discernible difference in performance or user experience. I do know that the above is a very over simplified example, but the principle holds fast: why include features just because we can.

The end of the compass…

To finally get to my point: the pragmatic approach to developing web technologies and practices, brings me to the subject of the responsive web design movement.

This is something that I see as critical to the web, but something that I also see as another piece of know how to be applied as and when required to aid the user experience. Many of the websites that are built simply wouldn’t benefit from having their information and user experience re-profiled to suit a smaller screen.

Why?

Because of the way people use mobile devices.

As a marketer than happens to have a history with design & code, and as a marketer that sadly knows way too much geeky stuff about the way people browse (through spending too much time researching!) on their mobile devices, I can honestly say that the majority of  people don’t browse on these devices in a way that requires re-profiling of information.

However, that isn’t the de facto standard. As I said above, the responsive techniques are no doubt here to stay, and i know that there are projects and sites crying out for this fantastic lightweight solution to the multi-device problem, but I believe that this pragmatic “is it appropriate for the task at hand” approach is the current state of this trend and that the assessment should be the place to start.

As a businessman, that fits in with the honest and genuine way I treat our customers; a fair appraisal of the task at hand, the goals to be measured against then then fitting the technology around the problems to find a solution that delivers optimum results.

Whilst there is no harm in adopting whatever approach you see fit when considering any new web technology, and I do see sincere merit in adopting the “mobile first” approach to site development, I would always start with the basic “how does this benefit the end users of this site, is it something that the client needs to allocate budget for and will that budget allocation be justified in the returns from the tech inclusion”?

That’s all for now folks.