Best Practices: Web Development Do’s and Don’ts

1. Go responsive — anyone not doing this these days will just be ignored by pretty much every human under age 30
2. Offer mobile-first design, with progressive enhancement for larger screens
3. Optimize accessibility to create a user experience that is fully accessible to all viewers — everything from supporting people with disabilities to serving up clear images for devices that support 3x+
4. Emphasize UX with good typography, leveraging the increasing number of web-specific typefaces and typekits, like Google Web Fonts, Adobe Typekit, etc.
5. Focus on long-form content as opposed to click-thru content
6. Provide CLEAR, real time feedback during form interactions. Don’t force users to guess the formatting needed, and consider small additions like auto tabbing between fields and formatting as you type to be super user-centric

Bloat and laziness in web development will sap your site’s energy, presenting usability issues that get in the way of content access. Here are the worst offenders:

1. Which kind of clickbait do you hate the most? (#4 will shock you)
2. Avoid the overuse of overlays and modals for survey, email sign up, whatever — anything that auto covers a page and puts up a roadblock to content
3. Lose the Flash player requirement
4. Farming ad clicks with lists that are presented one element per page
5. Not optimizing images for responsive sites
6. Autoplay anything