I've never claimed to be a great web designer. I've never claimed to be Mr. Innovative with the way I use the available technologies to do what I do for a living. However, I do claim to not churn out crap when it comes down to the basics.

I've head the pleasure, (or displeasure for that matter), of working with numerous marketing firms that create content for websites that I handle the backend processing for and am in constant amazement over the amount of _CRAP_ these places churn out...and get paid top dollar to do so. Here's just a small list of things I've nearly spit my coffee out over upon seeing it (*warning: some of this is nit-picky but I think most will agree):

• Stupid form fields -- Just a name field rather than First Name/Last Name fields. Why is this stupid? Say I want to collect some specific data, how do I know whether they entered first then last, or last then first, or just last or just first, etc. Big pain, and a big NO NO!
• The state field on said form was not a drop down list, but a fill in the blank field. Now most of us know our two letter abbreviation for the state in which we live, but I'm sure some don't, and many may fat finger it, type in capitals or lower case, or both. Again, if I want to sort data by state, I have to ignore the case, which isn't bad, but why not be consistent. That way, the user can't typo it either and you're not left wondering, is this really Montana or Missouri? Having everything entered identically means good demographics information
• Again, said form had one field for address leaving those folks with suite numbers or apartment numbers out in the cold, or filling it all out in one line making it more of a pain to parse that data. (Say I just want street address only, not apartment/suite information?)
• The biggest one however was the use of javascript to resize the browser window upon page load. YIPES! I haven't seen this in years! These people do know they're not in the porn industry and that its no longer 1996 don't they?!? Unless you have a very very very very good reason to do so, (I can't think of any), you should never take the control of the browser away from the user. I know...its tempting..oh look, I can control things...woohoo...but DON'T DO IT.

I just don't understand how/why corporations pay money for crap. Tell ya what, pay me the money, I'll go rub horse manure on the end-users screen for you and we'll call it even!

Anyway, enough of that. People say Web 2.0 is just a buzzword and I think they're mostly right. However, if anything, perhaps its just a new school of thought that focuses on a better user experience. Why don't I get to work with those kind of people?

The good news is, while my current client is doing some wild things that I'd have never dreamed of doing, at least they're not turning out crap when it comes to the basics. I guess that is the beauty of working with geeks and not marketers.