5 Coding Mistakes that Designers make.

Lets face it some of us are built for coding, and some of us built for design. Its a left brain and right brain thing, I’ve always maintained that people are mostly one or the other. Can you be a creative coder or a logical designer? My thinking is that the best of the best are either swayed heavily to one side or the other. Creativity or Logic. Anyway, I’m most certainly in the can’t design wont design (but sometimes try) camp..and therefore I feel I can spout at some of the coding mistakes that designers (who have been tasked with developing front end code) make.

1). Externalisation of js

If you’ve been tasked with developing front end / css / html in DW, you will probably seen those hideous MM_ scripts for preloading images and images swaps. These scripts are bad (see point 2), but if you must use them, get them spat into some external files, and call them in. The benefits of this are two fold. One they will get cached once, and run quicker, and the second reason is that less code in the page, will result in search engine spiders getting deeper into the site.

2). Using Proprietary JS (such as Adobe Dreamweaver).

Javascript can get a page particularly top heavy. Combine this with scripts that you dont understand (such as the Image Swapping / Preloading scripts included with Dreameaver behaviours), and you end up with a bloated end result. Either learn what the script does or write your own. Which can be much lighter.

3). Forgetting the all seeing amazing Search Engine optimisation tags

<metas></metas>
<title>Keyword</title>
<h1>Keyword Phrase</h1>
<h2>Variation Phrase</h2>
<h3>Further Keyword Phrase</h3>
<img alt=”FurtherFurther Keyword”></img>
<a href=”#NICEURL.html” title=”Futher keyword phrase</a>

You get the idea..

4) Linking using absolute URLs (all the time)

Sometimes it is difficult to know when to use either relative or absolute URLS. I have always prefered relative URLs as they help in web site maintenance. Also, it’s easy to transfer a web site from one domain name to another, particularly subdomains which require subdirectories. If you had used absolute URLs in all links and SRC attributes, you’d have a difficult time updating each link on each page. Pagesizes are smaller with relative URLs. If you use include files, relative links can be used with #include file=”../” #include virtual=”/” need absolute URLs.

5). Invalid code.

Plenty of brilliant designers have no idea when it comes to developing valid code. “The W3C Validator is my friend.” “Dreamweaver’s validator tools are awesome”. Read and Repeat. Most common of these is forgetting to close html tags, the name attributes on forms, and the font tag. CSS hacks are bad too. Avoid as much as possible.

Can you guys think of anything?

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