How do you define/defy “best practice”?
Filed under Best Practices, Management
Since the practice of setting and managing standards is as much a management concern as it is a technical concern, I spend time reading a number of business blogs. The HBR Voices blog is full of important management insights.
A recent blog post, How Are You Defying “Best Practice”?, was particularly insightful. Although the article was referring to business and management best practices, it just as easily could have been about design and code best practices.
The only difference is that, while the business world has well-documented and well-established best practices (most commonly taught in MBA programs worldwide), the Web design and development world doesn’t yet have that common set of agreed-upon best practices. What one designer or developer considers a best practice may be contrary to what another one believes.
This leads me to the question of how do you define what is an industry best practice? And, how do you defy those best practices, if at all?
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Best practices are designed to make the lives of others easier by adhering to the norm, the familiar and the expected.
For example:
Coding – Commented code, indented scripts
Nomenclature – About, Contact, News, Updates, Services, Clients
Usability – Logo linked to home
One defies a best practice when they disagree with the establishment or feel they can improve it or do better. Often this results in creating a new best practice which others then follow.
For example:
Browser wars – warnings vs. detection, statistics vs. end-of-life support, designer/developer desire vs. reality
Nomenclature – casual vs. professional, dictionary vs. slang, implied vs. specific.
Coding – Progressive enhancement vs. graceful degradation, Object Oriented vs. pure markup, fluid vs. fixed vs. fluid + max-width.
Usability – Sitemap vs. extended footer, search icon vs. search button, breadcrumbs v. sidebar.
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