The Rise of the Front-End Developer
devblog.eduhub.nl
devblog.eduhub.nl
I am a front-end developer too. I also like conversion rate optimization -- you have to expand your skillset, but value standards adherence, accessibility and performance as core features for a good front-end developer.
May I be so bold as to suggest that you eat my dogfood? At a glance I'd fix the 52 Validation errors and 34 warnings for W3C validation of the homepage. I'd also look at Google page speed/Yslow and follow their tips: minify your css and javascript, combine other resources, and leverage browser caching. Should make a hefty difference in performance on a site of that scale and traffic.
Or at least look at adding performance and standards/accessibility in your top 10 as a front-end developer. Marketing, your SEO or statistics co-founder can always do your A/B tests, bar maybe the technical implementation (though Visual Website Optimizer is very easy to use and implement). As my mom used to say: finish your plate first, else you won't get your dessert :)
Optimizing is something we'll do for sure in our redesign since we'll redo all the HTML anyway. My guess is that it won't be a hefty difference as you suggest, since our pages already load in 1,6s on average for NL users (via Pingdom).
We can go a bit further in caching with Nginx too btw.
On your last point: to a certain extent it's true that the SEO or other marketing guys can also make tests. But in practice, for the most interesing tests you really need a frontender, the basic stuff you can do with VWO and some CSS hackery doesn't bring us much anymore.
Be sure that we try to eat our plate, but we won't eat it for the sake of emptying it. Desert might be more efficient, and there's always the next meal (day) with new opportunities that need chasing. You're 100% right in theory, but not in practice :)
Validation offers little business value. My reply was perhaps a bit old-fashioned. Why eat your plate, when you can only eat desserts? But validation is a prerequisite for accessibility. Accessibility may or may not add business value -- like an architect that designs houses for people between 190 cm and 165cm might not ever face a problem.
I think Pingdom is not about page speed, but ping speed. Things like javascript resources won't be downloaded in parallel right now, no matter the Pingdom score: combining your 7 jQuery plug-ins will increase page speed.
You really need a front-ender for the exciting stuff, I agree. A statistician with front-end experience would be even better.
I understand that in iterating fast like you are, you might leave some crumbs, to move on to bigger and better things. But also in practice, as a good front-end developer, part of a good team, it is possible to validate and speed-optimize even the largest of sites.
And the multi-functionality you rightfully demand from a front-ender, you can extend to every scrum team member. That means if the front-ender hands in a valid template, back-end devs should take care (know just enough) to not invalidate it.
Most (not all) of the validation errors on our page are caused by external Javascripts (eg. VWO) by the way. But you do raise a valid point about some performance related issues, like minifying JS/CSS and combining files. The good news is, we're working on that!
Here's my guide:
1) Use CSS! Hide all that confusing color and placement code away from them.
2) Emphasize readability in the code. Spacing between sections, everything on it's own line, comments that tell even non-programmers where to put things (header, content, footer, etc)
3) MVC. Especially templating. Keep real code away from the stuff they'll be changing, like text and images.
Having said that, is it worth it? Only the parts that help programmers (including yourself) as well. Most clients will not get their hands dirty in this stuff out of simple fear, and they certainly won't pay you extra for it. (Assuming you gave a single quote up front and aren't getting paid hourly.)