Well, no because one still doesn’t need to have a license in order to be a working web designer.
But the comparison came to me while I was watching a home improvement show called Holmes on Homes where Mr.Holmes comes in and repairs the shoddy work of contractors who have basically skipped town with the money.
He usually has to tear down walls and rip up floors to get to the problem and he always seems to find bad plumbing,insulation and wiring.This particular episode showed a beautiful home,beautiful in every way cosmetically but underneath the gorgeous framework was a total nightmare.
Of course a home is a much more important thing than a website.
Bad/faulty wiring can kill,which is why contractors must have permits and licenses and their work must be inspected and pass code.
Your badly/outdated coded website will not kill you and may look great on the surface and depending on what you need it to do it might not need to be coded to standards anyway.
But when I’m asked to work on a website that wasn’t built to my standards I sort of feel like that exacting contractor who has nothing but contempt for the other worker and empathy for the ripped off client. In my case however, the client has no idea they’ve been ripped off and I have to be tactful when I explain how I’d like to proceed.I don’t always succeed in being tactful.
There are rules and standards and ethics involved in designing a website for me even though apparently there needen’t be any at all,I’m not held to any work ethic other than the one I make for myself.
Holmes goes into the house and explains to the homeowners in detail why this or that feature is all wrong.Then they stand back as he tears up their pretty looking but non functioning domicile and don’t bat an eye. They trust him. He’s Canadian. He’s on TV. He will fix it.
The situation is not so black and white for coding or (re-coding as the case may be) websites.I’ve tried explaining why templating and a master stylesheet are vital for faster and more organized website maintenance. I’ve tried to explain what web standards are.
Some get it, some think I’m talking over their heads to sound smart and make them feel dumb.What I’m really trying to do is explain that there are standards set for coding a website properly and their current site doesn’t meet those standards.Depending on how attached the client is to the website,how involved they were in the design process and their tender feelings of love toward their designer-I may come off sounding aggressive and pushy when I state the facts.
For any web designer who attempts perfection of code,the undertaking is an unappreciated and overlooked one and the same results might be achieved by [censored].Sorry I got carried away for a second.
The facts are:
- If clients do not know what web standards are, they do not know why they are important.
- They think their website is dandy.
Here is a checklist to make sure it actually is dandy:
- The Website showcases the information their site visitors to know/find.
- The Website pops up in searches using keywords that ought to ensure the site will show up.
- The Website’s home/landing page has actual content in it that is crawl-able.
- The Website’s important pages are indexed by major search engines.
- There is a a robots.txt file.
- There is a sitemap.