Comments on: The plight of the Front-End Web Developer today

By: Commodore64

Commodore64 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:05:13 +0000

This is the exact battle of moralities im talking about. I believe every good web dev has a marketing side to him/her as well as a usability side. Lately my usability side has been winning over my marketing side as I’ve been completely convinced that the marketing side will ultimately lose the fight.
Thanks for reading Craig.
keep on keepin on.
-C64

By: Johnny Admins

Johnny Admins — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:33:45 +0000

Yeah you have to keep up with the languages or else you will find that you fall off….

By: Craig Rosenblum

Craig Rosenblum — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:32:16 +0000

It’s just a very touchy topic for me, after years of working for ecommerce sites, that focus more on how to market whatever the new next hot thing was gonna be. And then totally discourage people from coming by not providing the kind of inventory of needed items at their retail, mail order locations.

That’s why i totally think the marketing approach is a dead end…You can push, sell, or suggest, and that will work for awhile as people get fulled by marketing tactics, but in the end this self-destructs, as customers soon realize you cant’ deliver anything they really need, in a good reasonable manner..

I wont’ name names, but that attitude of marketing over providing good service, inventory control, destroyed a lot of respect I had for businesses, that just ought to know better…

By: Commodore64

Commodore64 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:08:46 +0000

I totally agree. There are tons of examples of formerly successful sites that lost touch with providing quality and veered to far into the ‘wow’ factor. Sometimes this is a fatal mistake. More than anything I’ve heard my clients ask for something “flashy”. I’ve always advised against it just for the SEO reasons to begin with. Simple and effective still win the race. Kinda like the tortoise and the hare…

By: Commodore64

Commodore64 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:01:26 +0000

I know exactly what you mean – on one hand all the information is readily available, most of the time free, to learn a new language and maybe build osmething useful/marketable. But by the time get around to it, or get over the learning curve, its almost outdated by that time, and overdone by a multitude of other guys that beat us to the chase.
Play on, player.
-C64

By: Craig Rosenblum

Craig Rosenblum — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:40:20 +0000

Yes i remember those days, i was on my apple 2+, in the beginning of 1980 :)

But I myself am more of a front and back end programmer, and maybe the problem of pushing the wow factor as a key way of getting sales, has caused us to get so out of touch with providing the core needs a customer really wants…

Good Product/Service, Great Service, and Reasonable Pricing, and Great/Awesome Delivery of said product and service…

As you can see we’ve become market driven rather than are we even doing the core functions that keep us in business?

Because in the end, people will get bored of wow factors, and remember the core functions aren’t being done well if at all.

By: appsbyaaron

appsbyaaron — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:34:19 +0000

Great thoughts/comments. And it’s even harder for a guy like me who never really got the skills in web dev (outside of FrontPage) to really understand a lot of the new stuff. I tried to make my own Firefox extension a couple months ago and failed miserably because I don’t have time to get to know the new methods.