Webdesign: small decisions
Small choices to make early that keep paying out for years.
Notes I took over the years as a web designer.
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The three digits nobody reads
The status codes every page carries, where the numbers came from, and the ten worth knowing
When a browser asks a server for a page, the first thing that comes back is not the page. It is a line with a number on it. The browser reads that number, decides what to do — show this, go somewhere else, use the…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The code you did not write
What a plugin really is, and why this site has none
That last sentence usually gets one of two responses. Either “how is that possible”, or “why would you make life hard for yourself”. Both are fair, and the answer to both is the same: for a small site with a stable…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The address people write to
Why one email address, why hello@, and why not a contact form
Every address says something before a single message arrives. It tells the reader what kind of thing is on the other end: a person, a department, a machine, or nothing at all. Four of them turn up on almost every…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The page nobody designs
What to put on a 404 page, whether a joke belongs there, and when to redirect instead
Nobody plans to arrive there. Somebody mistypes an address, follows a link from four years ago, opens a bookmark from a laptop they have since replaced, or clicks something in a newsletter where a comma got stuck to the…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The page only one program can read
What a page builder does with your content, and what it costs to get it back
Both times the brief was the same, and both times it was phrased carefully, the way people phrase things when they suspect the answer is expensive. The site worked, more or less. It was slow. Small changes broke other…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The promise in every link
How to write a link, and why a web address should outlive the page
Nielsen Norman Group put it in four words: a link is a promise. The text says what the reader will find; the page has to deliver exactly that, immediately, without a second click. Every time it doesn't — the label said…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The keys, and who holds them
Passwords, two-factor, and the question nobody asks: whose name is the account in
The advice everybody absorbed in the 2000s — make it complicated, change it every three months, never write it down — produced exactly what you would expect. People invented one password with a capital letter and an…
Webdesign: small decisions
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Nothing to accept
Why this website has no cookie banner, and what it would cost to need one
European rules do not say "every website must ask permission". They say that before you store something on a visitor's device that is not strictly needed to deliver the page, you have to ask, and the asking has to be…
Webdesign: small decisions