Failure, Adaptive Web Design and Never-ending Updates

Posted On: 2014-07-18

Well here we are at the end of the week and slowly but surely I'm beginning to catch up.

Yesterday on Porn Resource I was complaining that even though it was Thursday I was just making a start on last Monday's work but it's amazing what you can get achieve when you can get a few hours of uninterrupted work. After being hassled by others in the office I agreed I would work from home for a few days and now I'm really on a roll.

You know, there are simple solutions to the problem of a phone that never stops ringing and people who constantly want to interrupt your work flow with problems they could have solved themselves. If you're facing days like that just take the phone off the hook and put some barriers between you and those time-wasters.

Maybe Content Management Systems aren't the answer
There was a time when we all thought that content management systems were the answer to every web designer's problems and in many ways they still are ... but ...

Earlier this week my partner started on the tedious task of updating all the plugins on our clients' WordPress sites. We decided to do that after a couple of old plugins had given hackers a free ride into the sites' backends so they could drop some nasty bulk email scripts.

Thankfully our server guys cleared all those scripts out for us but it still left the problem of out-of-date plugins so Steve started work. But ... he hadn't even finished all the updates before new updates for the updates he had already done began to appear.

Maybe I'm expecting too much of the guys who develop these plugins but at least I'm not the only one who thinks that it might be more economic to ditch content management systems and just go back to building websites with HTML and CSS. The latest newsletter from Sitepoint suggests that others are just as unhappy with content management systems as I am.

Adaptive Web Design
What you may well wonder is adaptive web design?

Well ... apparently ... it's the next big thing in web development. It seems that we are now on the cusp of moving on from responsive web design and all the hassles it has with shrinking images and other things.

And how is it different from responsive design? For simple people like me there seem to be two main differences. There is considerably less coding involved when you're including things such as video because, instead of sending a heap of stuff that individual browsers can't use, the server decides what the browser can handle and only sends that.

In the example I've seen ... where a video was being called ... one line of adaptive web code replaces 11 lines of responsive web code. And of course less coding also means faster page loads.

Sadly perfection seems to be lacking in so many things these days and it's no different with adaptive web design. A number of experts have already discovered problems but it's early days and we may yet see adaptive web design overcome those issues.

Why are you still failing?
Or perhaps the question should be ... why haven't you achieved your full potential?

Of course we can come up with all sorts of excuses to explain away the fact that we have yet to succeed in anything we do but when you're ready to face those questions honestly those excuses need to disappear and we need to admit that the problem is usually us.

We're still failing ... or we're not reaching our full potential ... because we falter at the final hurdle or don't push through some minor hassle. And we falter because we're more afraid of succeeding than we are of failing.

Sometimes success is just one more tiny step away but we find some excuse for not taking it because success will take us out of our comfort zone and we couldn't possibly go there. It's far less threatening to fail and stay in our comfort zone that it is to succeed to leave our comfort zone behind. Perhaps that's why so many people plan and dream of building their own business empire but never execute anything to move closer to turning their dreams into reality.

So are you a dreamer or are you actually going all out to achieve your goals? Only you know the answer but the results are often obvious.