We dispense a lot of advice here on the Roundpeg blog. We tell you about best practices in web design, graphic design, social media and marketing. We call some strategies and tactics stupid–sometimes in so many words. We do our best to offer advice that fits a wide variety of businesses and applies to many different circumstances. We try to show some nuance and shades of gray, but at the end of the day, your business is different from anyone else’s. And what worked for another  business, even one in your industry, may not work for you. And what was successful for you may lead to abject failure for someone else.

So go ahead. Ignore this blog post. Break all the rules. Do what seems right for your business. Oh, I’d like it if you kept some basics in mind, like not designing your website in Flash, not using Comic Sans as a font and not auto-feeding your social media to all your networks, but ultimately, you know your business. You love it more than anyone. And you’re going to be the one to make the final call.

People–clients and regular folks who ask for help–ignore our advice all the time. I’d like to tell you it always ends in heartbreak and ruin, that the wisdom that drops from our lips and our fingers is so vast that no one could possibly ignore it and live to tell the tale. But that’d be a lie. I’ve seen it work both ways. Sometimes clients do the exact opposite of what we tell them, and we can only watch from afar as it ends in predictable failure. There’s never any joy in that. But sometimes we’re wrong. Sometimes that strategy we thought was stupid or that tactic we thought was a waste of time works brilliantly. It happens.

Every blog post we’ve written here offering general advice has a dozen exceptions, a million caveats. Whether you’re just a reader of this blog or you’re a paying Roundpeg client, you’ll ultimately have to make your decisions about what’s best for you. And sometimes, that means breaking all the rules because you have good, honest reasons to believe that those rules just won’t work for you. That doesn’t mean breaking the rules because you simply don’t like them or because following those rules is hard or inconvenient. Break the rules, break them smartly and come tell me how wrong I was. I can’t wait to hear it.