Bad Coders VS. Lazy Coders

What’s the difference you ask? A lazy coder MUST be a bad coder! If you’re lazy then you’re not coding to best practices therefore you MUST be a bad coder.

While the above in part is true, there is an integral difference between someone who is a flat out BAD coder and one who is just a bit on the lazy side. If you’re looking to hire a coder there is a few key ways to tell the difference.

How to spot a bad coder vs. lazy coder

What could you do better as a web developer?

Nobody’s perfect, not even the best designers out there can claim perfection even as we fawn over their immaculate and beautiful design and code. Even for the design elite there’s always those few things we wish we could do better.

So, what’s your flaw? What do you think you need to work on? What elements in your design/code process do you wish you could do just a little bit better? And once you’ve defined that problem, how do you think you can make it better?

For each side of the web development process I want to improve one thing. From the design side, I want to broaden my “color imagination” and on the coding side I want to improve the readability of my source code for myself and other users.

Does Your Site’s Design Need a Facelift? - “I Need a New Design” Contest is For You!

Does your website still look like it was designed in the late 90s? Are you unhappy with the current design of your site? Or does it just need a simple face lift? The “I Need a New Design” contest is for you then. lifeBLUE is offering the winner of their contest a completely free redesign. All you have to do is submit your site and then have friends, family - anyone, vote your site up. The site with the most votes wins.

Currently though, the number one site is “reviewback.com” (which compared to some of the other sites isn’t THAT bad) with a lead of over 600 more votes than the second place person. I’m thinking that there may be some shady practices at work, considering this notice on the site:

We are having to deal with BOTS or Automated Scripts submitting SPAM VOTES to the contest. Over the next 24-48 hours all SPAM VOTES will be removed and your place in the contest will return to its rightful position. We will continue to work hard to maintain the integrity of the contest.

Otherwise the votes are pretty close, so take a look and throw your site into the mix if you think you’d like a new design - what could it hurt?! Hurry though voting ends August 8th!

What Is A “Fair Price” For Freelance Web Design and Development?

I was browsing through some bid requests a few weeks ago and noticed several common threads among postings. Clients want you to work as hard as you can as fast as you can for as cheap as they can get away with. For example, one request asked for TWO sites to be designed and coded and to be powered by CMS backends, but the budget was no more than $450…

I can totally respect budgets, but what about $450 for two complete sites design to code to CMS is fair? That barely covers the cost of the design for both sites, let alone the coding and implementation into a CMS! It certainly isn’t fair to any coder in the USA that would (desperately) take on that job.

A quote from another request:

I’m looking to have this done as inexpensively as possible (duh!)

Andy Budd: 3 Things You Wish Clients Knew About the Web

Andy Budd asks “What three things do you wish your clients knew about the web?“.