Bad Practices, Spam and irate Web Designers
Saturday, December 15th, 2007Today I received an email to an addy that I only use with PayPal, so of course it is reflected in their code on the buy buttons I use. The only people that would use it would be someone who had illegally spidered my addy.
This email was from someone who used this email addy. It was about Genealogy and since I belong to a FP and EW lists on Rootsweb and two of the help lists there I thought it was someone from the lists emailing me and it was not marked spam by my spam checker so I opened it and read it.
The email was touting a new book about how to make a site and publish it as a book also. Admirable you might think, that might be so if they had told you how to do this with a Web or Text Editor. However they were touting a Word Processor and a Desktop Publishing Editor, namely Word and Publisher.
How simply awful. The mere thought sent me to shuddering at the thought many people that will read that and produce sites that web users will not be able to read. Either because it will crash browsers or cause untold accessibility problems not to mention TEACHING this method.
I believe when you teach, no matter the subject you should be ethical in your practices, every single time.
In my humble opinion this is not the case here.
Make a book yes but please, please, please do NOT publish the output as a web site. That is what Expression Web is for. Or there are plenty of free Web editors around to produce your site in the correct way.
I won’t advertise their book for them so in order to recognise the book and site I am talking about .. this is a quote from their pdf file they ask you to look at.
“This appendix presents detailed information on the two website authoring applications we recommend, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher, and how to use them to createa genealogy website. A website authoring application creates the HTML files of the website. Also, the website authoring application should be capable of producing, in a straight-forward project, the genealogy book from the genealogy website. “The Book” as it is called in this guide is the traditional product of genealogy research and the dream of many genealogists.”
Start as you mean to go on and learn the right way when it comes to coding your site and the correct editors to use. If you are going to teach people how to create a book you do it one way. If you teach them how to create a website you teach another way. The two do NOT go hand in hand.
So what is the lesson here?
Firstly, kindly don’t spam. Spamming is liable to backfire on you.
Secondly if you are going to teach a method make sure your not promoting bad practices to those people who have the least idea on how to proceed in a new and scary genre.
Lastly the owners of this book and site sent the email to the wrong two people who feel strongly about valid and accessible code. (My good friend Pat Geary also received this email). Hence this post from two irate web designers!