How to tell if a website sucks, a flowchart
I’ve been training a new web guy this week, helping him unlearn a lot of what he was taught in university, and pointing him at the things that the academic path ignores completely. His first task was to review our existing sites, and to spend some time really learning HTML/CSS. So I dropped by his desk the other day, and I found him reading about.com, experts-exchange, and dev-x. We’ve got some work to do.
I explained to him that there is a gargantuan difference in quality between different sites. A List Apart, for example, is gold. About.com is crap. The dev-x and similar sites are horrid too, and reading them will damage your brain. But guess what? Most young developers can’t tell the difference between sites that suck and sites that form the basis of all that is good.
So I slapped together a flowchart to help the newbs filter the suck from the non-suck. In case you’re curious, I used Inkscape and the Gimp to put it together.