We, the developers of the Web…

In her newest column at O’Reilly, Meg discusses her online usage patterns while we were in Paris last month. For companies that value their customer relationships, what follows from this article is an easy plan for Web development: focus on serving the customer and everything else will take care of itself.

This is like a Declaration of Independence for Web developers. All the difficult decisions concerning Web development are made for you. Use CSS and XHTML to make your pages clean and fast-loading. Use a database or XML to store your data so that it can be easily output into multiple formats for different devices & programs. Put the most-used tasks right on the front page of your Web site. Make sure your server is up most of the time. Think about what you have to offer to people and give it to them in the most useful way. Make it easy for people to contact your company in a variety of ways.

Developers, you’re free. Go forth and build great Web sites for us all to use.