I've been freelancing as an all-purpose web developer/designer for three years now, and to me the main problem isn't the professionals understanding of these should-be-obvious points, it's the clients.
Every site I've built in the past years (20+) where the client wants design mods near the end has, almost always, to do with breaking good design practice and stuffing more and more pointless, hard to read information onto a page.
I try my best to use the paper-as-a-cost analogy...the reason print media got so adept at stuffing more and more on a page was because paper costs money, and therefore it made deep financial sense to force as much money-making content as possible on a printed page.
This idea makes no sense, however, on the web where the cost of making things accessible and easy-to-understand is basically $0.
Most of the time, this argument works, although of course sometimes it just falls on deaf ears where the client is simply too enamored with how their newspaper or the Wall Street Journal online used to do it.
Every site I've built in the past years (20+) where the client wants design mods near the end has, almost always, to do with breaking good design practice and stuffing more and more pointless, hard to read information onto a page.
I try my best to use the paper-as-a-cost analogy...the reason print media got so adept at stuffing more and more on a page was because paper costs money, and therefore it made deep financial sense to force as much money-making content as possible on a printed page.
This idea makes no sense, however, on the web where the cost of making things accessible and easy-to-understand is basically $0.
Most of the time, this argument works, although of course sometimes it just falls on deaf ears where the client is simply too enamored with how their newspaper or the Wall Street Journal online used to do it.