Typical Myths About Web-Development

1. It’s simple, and anybody can do it.
   Myth: Web development is for boys. Truth: Web development is for Spartan warriors. People still underestimate the amount of effort that goes into creating a great site or application. The various components are easy, but putting them together in the right way takes time and experience.
2. Successful web sites can/should be designed completely in a couple of days.
   In reality you can’t get a site fast, cheap and good. You can’t have all three. The fact remains, that even when using open source frameworks to build sites, a truly custom design integration into a customized or even standard CMS is not a task that can be done properly in just a few hours.
3. Accessible web pages are visually dull.
   This is a myth that has been battled against since people started to think about web accessibility. Unfortunately it is still perpetuated by accessibility consultancies tasked with designing websites, but who don’t employ actual designers.
4. Visual design deserves more time and effort than the content.
   The content is where it starts and is the reason for the design to exist, yet, so many designers still view copywriting and content creation as “not my job”. On projects where there’s a dedicated copywriter, that may work. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
5. Standards-compliance guarantees a good web site.
   There are many young developers out there caring so much for code that they seem to forget everything else, while to be true, a good designed website (form & function) with bad code still works better than a bad designed with an awesome code.
6. Design and best design practices are expensive.
   It can only be true if you haven’t yet learned how to develop accessible sites with web standards, in which case it’s time to start reading.
7. One aspect of web design is dominant over all of the others.
   Usability is often seen as reining supreme. Although it is incredibly important it needs to be tempered by business objectives, technical constraints and even accessibility considerations. Some see design as more important than anything, others well written code. The truth is that web design is about balance.
8. Absolute separation is possible.
   In reality proper use of semantic (X)HTML and CSS completely abstracts the presentation of a site from its content is impossible.
9. Feature X is “not possible.”Just because it hasn’t been done, doesn’t mean it’s not possible. We’ve got dozens of tools (HTML, CSS, Flash) at our tooltips — don’t let anyone tell you that it can’t be done. It just hasn’t been done yet.
10. IE is an absolute nightmare to develop for.
    It requires a little perseverance to get it there 100%, but with a little compromise (graceful degradation), you can have it looking pretty much (95%?) the same as it does in other browsers.
11. The “necessary” abundant use of hacks.If your HTML is well structured and you understand how CSS is supposed to work as well as how it does work in different browsers, you need few, if any hacks.
12. Keeping the various layers of a website is too difficult and requires too much effort for very little return.
    If you start with a strict focus on keeping all the layers (database, server-side code, html, css, javascript) separate that in the long run you will save yourself a lot of time developing and prevent a lot of headaches too.
13. Internet Explorer 7 is an improvement over IE6.
    Microsoft was going to deliver a product that would make our lives as web developers easier, but its done nothing but add more garbage to the pile.
14. Developers can’t be designers, designers can’t be developers.
    It might seem there is a clear divide between the two, however there are people out there who have no problem being both. CSS/XHTML is a great middle point, from there you can progressively go either way.
15. “Un-design” sells.Whomever suggested that should retire. Ideas sell. Ideas that look great sell more.
16. Bad ideas are useless.
    Every idea — no matter how dumb — is a potential breakthrough or could lead to a breakthrough. You’ve got to document those bad, random ideas. Plus, you get to save them and revisit them for future inspiration.

Credit: SmashingMagazine