My opinion is that for whatever reason when sitting behind keyboard humans, and us designer/developer types too, become the laziest people in the world. Thats why I love best practices. The best best practices are those that keep me from doing something over and over again. In the world where a semicolon or a misspelling can completely through off your code a routine or personalized frame work are king. Best practice covers a broad range of stuff to have best practices for like design, HTML dev, Javascript dev, team projects, all the list goes on. I can only scratch the surface in this post and will try to come back and up date it regularly. Well, lets do this.
General Best Practices
Respect your visitors
This is a good one if you like people visiting your site. I don’t think I am alone in wanting to face punch the devs out there who just do something because it is easier for them to do so, completely neglecting a good user experience. 5 more minutes can go a long way when it comes to keeping visitors.
Inform and teach your visitors
This could probably be a part of the first item but I think it is strong enough to stand on its own. Its pretty simple. Don’t just put crap on the internet. There is tons of it already. But really if you have interesting or GOOD [i stress good, see its in all caps] content your way ahead of the game.
Hate Internet Explorer if you like, but don’t ignore its users
I HATE IE. Ask any one at school. I want go “Office Space” on every computer I come across that has anything less than IE8. The simple fact is that people don’t always have a choice. A lot of people working for larger corporations, making a fairly decent percentage still 15.3% as of June are still using IE6 & 7. To me if 15 out of ever 100 users that come to my site see a jacked up site I’ve done a shoddy job. It sucks, suck it up, – if you write good code [see HTML Best Practices] you’ll be alright with relatively little suffering
Contact, but don’t spam
I am biased on this one, I would like spammers to be eaten by one of the crites from “Critters”. Just on a personal level I remove anyone who posts so fast that they can manage to get 5 posts in a row on my wall or feed. I’m not entirely friendless either I follow enough people to where I would guess I get a post or tweet a minute. I understand your automated service might have tweeted too many times and in that case I can make an exception. However unless you get a “verified account” from twitter or are a company or business I doubt you’re that popular.
Never compromise your principles
Don’t do it. Please just don’t sell your soul for the sake of something a client asked for. If in your deepest of hearts you know it wrong or crappy, just don’t do it. This is all I will say.
Development Best Practices
Use a frame work, but make it your own
I know you probably won’t go open up the j-query core and start tinkering around. But try a couple of the more popular one’s like jquery, mooTools, ext.js, or something similar and get familiar with it and what you can do with it. Don’t just find someones code online and copy and paste but try to write it yourself and before you know it you’ll be writing your own jquery functions. Also try making your own. I have a template that I pretty much start out with the doctype a few common divs use on most every site and a reset[see Use a Reset] and style css.
Use a Reset
I understand the argument against it if you were brought up the old school way. But this can a) save you some headaches in IE and b) Keep you from wanting to punch the browser you didn’t develop in in the head.
separation of behavior, content, and style
Nothing wastes my time more that someone writing an inline style and handing it off to me and my job being to change a style which I would think would be found in the CSS. Play nice and put every thing in the proper place, the style with the .css files, the behavior with the .js or whatever your poison is, and letting the html just be sexy html. Also comment your code, I should make this one its own. But taking 2 seconds to quickly describe why or how you did something can keep someone or yourself from breaking it to pieces.
Here are some links that got my motors turning and I will try to post many more. Like I said I will barely scratch the surface.
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/85-best-practices-dynamic-content/
http://terrymorris.net/bestpractices/
http://woorkup.com/2010/01/10/best-practices-to-develop-perfect-websites-for-iphone-and-mobile-devices/
http://css-tricks.com/404-best-practices/
http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/20-rules-of-smart-and-successful-web-development-and-web-design