I’ve read articles like this before, but they’re usually written by fellow web designers, so whilst they might be spot on, they’ll always be seen as more than a little bias.

But this article was written by Seth Godin, the man Google pays to come and talk to them about marketing. This man deserves your attention. He’s the author of several fantastic books which you should buy, and an amazingly insightful blog that you should subscribe to.

No-one else gives so much away for nothing, and it’s always such sensible, obvious advice. The funny thing is that most people do the exact opposite of what he suggests.

In my biased opinion, the most important piece of advice in the article is point number eight “If you hire a professional: hire a great one. The best one. Let her do her job.”

I’m a big subscriber of the Fight Club notion that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, but frustratingly, I’m forever being proved wrong. This isn’t just about needing to shop at obscure overseas web sites to get the books I want to read, it’s about the work I do everyday.

A couple of years back I had a really nice MR2. When I wanted a new sound system, despite having enough knowledge to do it myself, I went to the best car audio shop I could find, told them my requirements and let them deal with it. I got better gear than I would have myself, and it functioned flawlessly till the day I sold the car and undoubtedly beyond.

When my previous coffee machine started playing up, I rang the distributer and told him of my problem. He picked it up, took it away and fixed it. It came back and worked perfectly until I sold it the other day, and will probably continue to work indefinitely.

There’s a million examples of this kind of thing, but the point remains the same. If I can’t do something myself, I’ll pay someone to do it. Sometimes I’ll even pay someone to do something that I could do myself, but either way, I know they’ll do a better job than I could have, so I leave them to it.

Maybe I’m the only one that doesn’t modify the paintings on my wall, or doesn’t tell the mechanic that, despite what they may think, they’re wrong and those brakes will work just fine on my car. Maybe I’m the only one who assumes that the professionals know what they’re doing, and leaves them to do their thing. Maybe I am a beautiful and unique snowflake…

I’ve come to terms with having to justify my every decision. I don’t remember ever asking a builder to justify his decision to put foundations down, but I do know that sometimes people are just genuinely curious, and they’ll listen and take what I have to say onboard.

Most of the times though, it gets silly. People disagree with my justification, push for a few different changes and end up with an unpolished, illegible, cluttered, cliche, unusable, nonfunctional site that doesn’t perform.

I understand that certain things are subjective, but for the most part, usable design goes beyond subjectivity. If your line length is too long, or leading too tight, people will have difficulty reading your site. If you pack too many features on the front page, people will get overwhelmed and you’ll loose a large percentage of first time visitors to bounces.

Certain colors clash and shouldn’t be used in certain places, certain fonts should never be used for body copy, depending on the objective of the site, certain layouts are more effective than others. Certain features just aren’t going to be used by first time visitors, and should be hidden away until a visitor becomes more comfortable with the site.

I don’t mean to sound like a whiney little bitch, and I’m not saying I’m never wrong. But if you’ve paid me to build you a web site, then the implication is that you don’t know enough about this stuff to do a good job yourself.

So why then, would you tell me how to do my job?