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Interesting that the down vote from noblemaster comes from a website which still uses table-based layouts, has information overload, and has a not so pretty design.

Go figure.

And the up votes seem to come from your friends or colleagues...

Go figure...

Hi bloid. Are you ever going to be nice to us when we submit an article? My friend gave us a single up vote because he liked the article, nothing wrong that.

My point is that before you start having a go at people who may down vote your article (as is their right), you may want to look at who is voting your article up...

Not sure what you're going on about bloid - I came across this post as people normally do (i.e. because it is a rising link) and I, having absolutely no prior knowledge of the author, have given it an UP vote entirely on merit. I think this article was well thought out, gives fantastic advice and provides (freely) methods that further the efforts relating to the challenges of "Good web design".

Whilst the author may have had an UP vote from a friend, I am happy about that fact, since that vote has helped towards bringing this article to my attention - which is the WHOLE POINT!

The DOWN vote however - I cannot comprehend other than for the very reasons mentioned in the first comment - because as a long time (12 years) web developer now, I too have come through the pains of table based designs and have had much more success since making the switch to pure CSS. I can only conclude that the negative vote was done with malicious intent since noblemaster has not given us a reason for the DOWN vote - which could then be learned from for better writing in future - but it seems has has no such pearls of wisdom for us. Oh well, probably better that way.

Great article! Keep them coming :-)

Yeah, I was talking about the first people who were voting for this (as you can see, my original comment is 8 hours old as I type this one)

And my original point (which may have got mislaid along the way) was not that this is not a good article, but that attacking someone for voting it down seems a little bad form when trying to promote your services

Bloid - as I said, one person other than myself who I know personally voted the article up. Is it not permitted for a friend to VOTE UP an article if they deem it worthy of a VOTE UP?

I've never experienced such difficulty with any administrator on any community based website other than you on DZone. It is actually quite confusing to say the least.

Be well.

Professional:

a: participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs
b: having a particular profession as a permanent career
c: engaged in by persons receiving financial return

In short, anyone making a site and getting paid for it is building a "professional web site".

Iem - thats your opinion and it is respected. However, people can easily claim to be "professional" just by selling a product, despite the quality of their services. This is the main point of the article.

A web design company is still making money even with the absence of the label "professional". If you can't conform to the latest technologies and abide by CERTAIN rules (at least the basic ones i.e. XHTML, CSS validation), how much of a professional are you?

To us, professional means "superior performance compared to the competition". Theres nothing superior about table-based layouts or a disgusting number of validation errors on a website (although we will admit, the only pages on our website which don't currently validate are the blog pages which you're viewing - the reason for this is because of the "Share This" social bookmarking plugin we had integrated into our blog which unfortunately spits back a bunch of errors that can't be fixed. We'll be getting rid of that soon and trying something different.)

Thanks to everyone who enjoyed the article, especially you robert. We appreciated your comments and felt right at home with everything you said.

If you take a moment and look at the Number 1 post of all time (on DZone), you'll notice it has over 100 UP VOTES, and only 1 DOWN VOTE. Please note the name of the person who gave that 1 DOWN VOTE: none other than the same person that gave this article a down vote, yours truly, noblemaster.

Don't you think you are behaving little bit childish?

that's not my opinion, it's the definition of the word:

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/professional

"professional" is an old and very tired term that has been used so much it completely lost its meaning in IT industry.

what's your problem?

First of all, I believe your article was well written and your web site looks a lot prettier than mine. It's better designed too. Also, thank you for sending me the email about my down vote.

Please don't take it personal, but I think your article is far too long for its own good filled with a lot of common-sense knowledge which I probably should use on my own web site as you suggested, but I just don't have the time to do so. It appears lots of people like your article, so what do you care about my down vote?

I down voted your article and I am not going to take it back. It's a good article, it just doesn't do it for me, so please refrain from stalking me. Thank you.

Noble - we wanted to be in-depth as possible for new comers wishing to create a professional quality website on their own, hence the length of the article.

We're glad you're not going to take back your vote, nor do we want you to. However, voting an article down because it is full of details doesn't make much sense to us.

Oh well, to each his own. Good day.

No, it's a lengthy article filled with common sense knowledge. It's well written, with very little content. It's a good sales pitch I have to admit.. Let's have a look at step 4 and 6.

> Step 4: Attention to detail
You list a bunch of stuff, but never actual tell the reader what to do about it. As a "professional" company, you must have some expertise? Any recommendations?

> Step 6: Well written, interesting, grammatically-correct content
For obvious reasons, nobody is writing badly written, boring and grammatically wrong content on purpose. Tell me something I don't know?

Also, how professional is a company that edits other people's comments on the blog?

"Also, how professional is a company that edits other people's comments on the blog?"

When the comments are tasteless, it makes a lot of sense that a company will edit the comments on their blog. After all, their customers will be looking over the tasteless comments, and seriously, if you can't say something constructive, don't say anything at all.

We're not even going to entertain you with a response, since your previous comment made absolutely no sense.

Continue on, doing whatever it is you do, noblemaster.

Just thought I'd add -

It looks like noblemaster took down his DOWN VOTE for the number one rated article on DZone since we mentioned it yesterday.

Makes you wonder if his intentions were to sabotage a perfect rating? Obviously he wasn't too passionate about that vote since he took it off when we brought it up here.

?