If we learned anything about the recent Olympics, it's that just a little extra effort pays off. When Phelps scored his sixth (or was it the seventh? ninth? umpteenth?) gold medal, he was .01 seconds faster than the anonymous swimmer who earned silver.
Point-zero-one. Think about that, for a moment. Twelve or fifteen years of training, study, practice, doing without pizza and french fries. And the difference was only point-zero-one? If you took home the silver that night, how could you live with yourself? If you had eaten one more Wheatie that morning, it may have made all the difference.
Much of Life works like this. Especially in athletics, but it shows up in many other areas, and you can be sure that in another five hundred words I'm going to try to bend it around to Web work, too, right? You betcha!
Think about money, for a moment. You earn $100 and you spend $98. You can do that for the rest of your life. But if you earn $100 and spend $100, or worse, earn $100 and spend $101, you will be miserable in just a few years, and potentially for the rest of your life. All for the difference of only two or three dollars a month.
Eating is the same as money, really. Take in a hundred calories and expend a hundred calories and you can wear the clothes you wore to prom for the rest of your life. But if you eat a hundred calories and only manage to burn 98, eventually you will end up looking like, well, me. Think of the implications of that, for a moment.
From the Mark Hiatt Big Book of Business Clichés: "There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over".
We have to start taking this one back, folks. Spell check your pages. Validate your markup. Have someone else read your new page to make sure it says what you think it says. These are each little things. Collectively, they may add another three minutes to the time it takes you to build a Web page. But the payoff is that you soon gain a reputation for building dependably great Web pages.
There are many worse reputations to have, kids.
A nationally-famous Web site made fun of some of our pages, recently. Deservedly, which really stung. The author probably knew the pages were, um, bad, on delivery. Imagine needing Flash to navigate a page. Now imagine needing to click on moving links to get from page to page. See what I mean? Someone, somewhere, and probably several people, should have caught this one early. "Uh, that's a bad idea" is all it would have taken. But the pages went live and some measure of our reputation has been tarnished. But I know one thing:
It won't happen to me.
I build compliant pages within the approved Template. I validate the markup and I check my speeling. I try to have someone else look it over, preferably someone unfamiliar with the material and someone who does not have a connection with it. If I were making pages for Athletics, I would not ask a coach to look over my pages, for example. If I worked in training, and hey, I do, I would not ask another trainer to read my work. Get a civilian, and then listen to how they respond.
Maybe one day I will be recognized for my work. Maybe one day someone will say, "Hey, Mark? Thanks for keeping us out of the papers for having bad pages" but even if no one ever does, as the saying goes, Virtue is its Own Reward.
It's a little extra effort. I can do a little extra effort to make sure I don't embarrass myself and my peers. Maybe one day I'll win a gold medal, too.
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2 comments:
Great post, Mark!
And the page you speak of would be really bad and deserved the criticism.
"I try to have someone else look it over, preferably someone unfamiliar with the material and someone who does not have a connection with it."
That's it, isn't it?
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