Advanced Bells & Whistles

Remember back to when you first learnt how to design web sites? Remember adding all those bells & whistles? I certainly do. Why did I add them? Because it seemed cool at the time.

The thing is… I’m still adding bells & whistles! Only now they’re more advanced bells & whistles.

Now that I know how to use the likes of Apache‘s mod_rewrite module or PHP‘s include function, I find myself wanting to make everything search engine friendly or use includes left, right and centre, when I should be keeping things simple. It’s a hard habit to break. When you know you can do something extra special – even though you probably don’t really need to – you find yourself doing it anyway… because it seems cool.

What’s worse is, these advanced bells & whistles can cause you more headaches than just keeping it simple.