By Harry Roberts CHAPTER 1- The client: The person paying you to build the site, the person paying
your bills. - The users: The people who will be using the site that the client is paying
you to build. - You: The developer, who has to work with, scale and maintain the site.
You need to remember these stakeholders and make sure you do the
right things for the right people for the right reasons.
The ClienT
The client doesn’t care about semantics. The client doesn’t care about how
many IDs and classes you have or haven’t used. They don’t want to know
that you can’t quickly duplicate a piece of content because you used an ID
and IDs aren’t reusable. It’s not their problem to worry about things like
that, and it’s your responsibility to shield them from these things.
The client cares about how quickly and efficiently (and therefore
cheaply) you can update their site, they care about how reliable and robust
it is, how nicely it works on a wide variety of browsers and devices.
The uSeR
Users don’t care about code: we all use sites day in, day out, that use terri-
ble-looking code (though not necessarily terrible code in itself). Even as de-
velopers we have no concern over how well-written Facebook’s or Google’s
markup is; we care that the sites and services we want to use are fast and
reliable. Code is to a website what bricks and mortar are to a building: very
important, but not really what people turn up to see.
You, The DeveloPeR
You care about how well-documented the codebase is, how nice it is to work
with, how naturally it can scale, how easily it can be maintained, how quick-
ly you can make changes, how effectively you can fulfill clients’ requests.