We're Our Own Worst Enemies

We dislike HTML emails, so they must not work.

We abhor Flash on websites, so we shouldn’t use them.

Tables must never be used except for tabular data, so anyone who uses tables for layout must be the devil.

We’re so high and mighty on our self-made pedestals that we forget that nobody cares about famous or important or smart we are on the internet. Clients don’t care. Our bosses don’t care. And the visitors to our websites don’t care. We’re super users. Everyone else is just a user and they’re not nearly as opinionated about the web as we are.

While we’re so busy shooting down HTML email or Flash interfaces, there are companies making lots of money doing exactly these things and succeeding. It’s still cutting edge stuff for a lot of clients who are still replacing their throwaway newsletters with permission-based email newsletters. In five years, those clients will start asking how they can get involved in this whole Twitter thing. And I suspect the same people will roll their eyes and tell them how Twitter is so 2008.

Let’s all get over ourselves for a minute and remember that a lot of the world still needs our help to catch up to the new millenium.