Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
The web is never ready
I've been working in a whole bunch of web projects. The projects have varied from business sites to educational applications and personal projects (like this blog for myself). And one thing I know I've learned is there's not such thing as ready and same when making a website.
During these over 10 years I've been messing around the conventions, standards and techniques have changed so much the past feels like a whole different world. For instance for my last blog, sometime in the early ears of this century, I built the whole content management and commenting system. I can assure you it wasn't pretty, but it worked. Now I'll rather just use Drupal or something to build on.
The web browsers have developed incredibly much during this time as well. When I started to dabble with making websites there was pretty much (in general use) Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers. Now we have a whole variation of desktop browsers, and all the mobile devices with their browser versions to add to the list. It's a crazy mess when you try and build a pretty site.
Because of this constantly changing nature of web, building something which purpose is to look and be all the same many years to come, as well as on all the different browsers and devices, is futile. It's clear all the different browsers add their little spice to the mix. Expecting the site to look exactly the same on all of them is silly. Besides, tomorrow when they release a new version of this-and-that browser, that trick you did to make the site look the same on it as this other browser is already broken.
The web designers who don't have real web building experience and understanding continue to make the mistake of expecting the website to look the same and behave the same on all the platforms. This results only to awful mess of hacks and tricks.
Creating something fixed for web is crazy. Your website visitors may expect familiarity, but they most definitely expect things to be new, fast and shiny. They don't care if there's a pixel or two of difference. They don't care if there are slight design differences between viewing the site with Chrome and Firefox (especially when most of them use only one or another). The only thing they care about is getting the content and getting it fast. Faster, if possible.
Pretty is good, but it doesn't have to be perfect. Most of all it's okay to publish the site and improve it after publishing. Tiny tweaks are easier, but bigger ones aren't impossible either. Fixing things is easier when nothing is set in stone.
Besides all the technical changes, even search engines are expecting your site to evolve. Year ago Google started to give more "fresh" sites upper hand. If your site gets frequently updated it has better chance to get high on search results than those that are updated more rarely or never.
All that said, web is never ready. And it's doesn't stay the same. Try and keep up and make you site flexible rather than trying to make it perfect at once.
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