General
February 26, 2005
In the business of web design, keeping the client happy is the most important thing you can do. Reducing expectations is an old marketing trick that helps us with this goal.
THE 3 STRATEGIES OF REDUCED EXPECTATIONS
1. THE BONUS FEATURES
If your project consisted of say a 10 page website with minimal static graphics; maybe adding a tasteful Flash animation in place of a static image might put a smile on your client’s face. Whatever you provide, it is important that you bring it into the mix after you’ve settled on a price and features – the key is creating that perception of a free bonus.
I used to say something like:
"I was finishing up the site, and I thought that a nice Flash animation would be really effective for your website, so I created something for you. Don’t worry though, I was able to fit it in budget."
The trick is that from the beginning, I already accounted for this extra feature, but just didn’t mention it to my client! So in essence, I created a lowered expectation from the start so that I could ‘in the last minute’, come up with something extra. 😉
2. THE UNEXPECTED SAVINGS
You can apply this same principle with billing: quote higher than what you need and when the project is done, come back with an ‘unexpected discount’.
3. THE QUICK TURNAROUND
Another way to use this principle is with delivery dates. Tell your client it will take three weeks, when you actually know it will take two. Doing this will give you a buffer, just in case something goes wrong or (hopefully,) you can deliver the website that much quicker, impressing your clients.
CONCLUSION
How you use this strategy depends on the project, client and your experience. With time, you will see the pattern where you will lower expectations in the beginning, so you can impress them at some future point. Doing this will help insure a long term relationship with your clients.
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February 24, 2005
People have gone a little ‘cucu for coco-pops’ when it comes to the Web Standards.
The Web Standards zealots have taken a specification (that was created to serve as a guide for browser manufactures,) and made it into a set of ‘holy commandments’ for web designers.
This ‘movement’, that is largely based on false and erroneous claims; claims that have caused counted countless wasted hours, and has brought many web designers to tears … and all for little to no practical benefit.
The Web Standards are a great thing … it is the Web Standards movement that has gone way to far – and to the benefit of who I wonder?
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This is just the first in a series of articles that will reveal the truth about this mess.
I will challenge (and disprove) the (supposed) advantages of zealous adherence to the Web Standards.
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February 23, 2005
Killersites.com’s central philosophy is based in real-world web design principles. Real-world web design is about being able to filter out the ‘garbage’, while concentrating on what really works.
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In the web design and programming world, it is common for people to get caught up with trends that actually get in the way of our work. Many times the source of these ‘trends’ is found with people who are looking to make a profit.
I’ve been burnt in the past (and on more than one occasion,) by getting caught up with ‘the next greatest thing’. I’ve put together a list of the top 7 principles of Real-World web design, with the goal of helping people avoid common pitfalls.
THE PRINCIPLES OF REAL-WORLD WEB DESIGN
- Keep your eye on the prize: your job is to build effective websites, not to waste time on nerd-details that have no pratical impact.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel: use website templates, blogs and CMS (content management systems.)
- Don’t be ruled by ivory-tower specifications: pay attention to the reality in the field!
- Beware of upcoming technologies: ‘the next big thing’ is usually a one-hit-wonder.
- Respect your REAL audience: People surf the web with browsers – not website validators!
- Stick to: mainstream technologies and tools – avoid the weird stuff.
- Remember: most people don’t care what browser they’re using.
Stefan Mischook
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February 23, 2005
Given the recent IE7 development, where many commonly used CSS hacks will now break many websites in the future (forward compatibility myth destroyed …) because (ironically) IE7 will be Web Standards compliant.
Many CSS books will have to be pulled from the shelves given a liberal use of hackery in many titles including:
* Eric Meyer on CSS
* More Eric Meyer on CSS
* The Zen of CSS design
* 250 HTML and Web Design Secrets
* Web Standards Solutions
* Designing with Web Standards
All these books (and several more,) make use of hacks and as such are outdated.
BTW: many of the titles are well written and have some good information in them (I’ve read them all and given several of them positive reviews … overall,) but nonetheless, the aforementioned flaws make these titles land mines for the unsuspecting web designer.
False prophets be gone.
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February 23, 2005
As the title suggest, this books teaches modern DOM scripting techniques.
What is DOM scripting?
DOM scripting is using JavaScript, CSS and the DOM to manipulate what is displayed in a web page. The ‘DOM’ is the acronym for:
Document Object Model
This essentially is just a ‘map’ of a web page’s structure – roughly speaking.
You can do all kinds of cool things with the DOM (with the help of JavaScript,) … for example:
- Create dynamic menu’s.
- Show/hide parts of the page based on a mouse click or any other user action.
- Connect to the server in the background and load new content into the page without having to refresh the page – commonly called AJAX these days.
- Add new HTML or CSS to the page, on-the-fly.
What you need to know to read this book:
You need to be comfortable with HTML and CSS but you probably can get by without any programming experience. I say ‘probably’ because there are some points at the beginning where the basics MAY be a little unclear for some.
Should you get this book?
The book is very good and worth getting. The author has a clear and concise way of presenting the subject and I really enjoyed the read … not boring at all.
Unlike many JavaScript books out there, ‘Dom Scripting’ does a great job in presenting modern methods that include:
- Keeping behaviour separate from structure – Java nerds would call these ‘listeners’.
- How to use JavaScript in such a way that it degrades gracefully and is accessible.
Final comments:
While learning the concepts of DOM scripting, you will gain a much greater understanding of the ‘framework’ of a web page … you will begin to understand things about HTML/XHTML and CSS that you could not otherwise.
So even you are not too keen on actually doing any DOM scripting, I still highly recommend this book for these reasons.
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Stefan Mischook
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February 22, 2005
This list summarizes my often time controversial positions for everyone to see and attack!
Attacks aside, I felt it was time to come out with a new list of best practices in web design with the aim of making web designers lives a little easier.
🙂
THE DO’S AND DON’TS OF PROFESSIONAL WEB DESIGN
- Don’t use CSS hacks – they will break in IE7.
- Do use IE conditional comments to write CSS code that only IE will see*.
- Don’t use XHTML in your web pages because:
- XHTML is not properly supported in IE6, IE7 and some other browser – this makes up about 80-90% of the browsers being used today.
- XHTML is restrictive in terms of:
- the tag attributes you can use.
- it makes DOM / AJAX scripting that much more trouble.
- Even in a perfect world, XHTML does not provide a significant advantage over HTML 4
- Do use HTML 4.01 doctype.
- Do use CMS’, Blogs and web templates as much as possible – saves time and money.
- Do make your websites accessible.
- Do use CSS for page layouts if CSS based layouts are NOT a big headache; otherwise use HTML tables.
- Don’t get fooled into believing that Web Standards based websites will have any practical impact on how well your websites and web design will do in the market place. 99% of the world doesn’t care and even worse – most don’t even know what the Web Standards are.
- Do break out of the Web Standards if they get in the way of getting the job done – Web Standards are NOT holy scripture.
- Don’t nest tags too deeply – nested div’s are just as bad as nested table’s.
Notes:
CSS hacks are often used to hide CSS code from IE so that you can manage the inconsistencies between IE’s broken DOM and better browsers like FireFox.
Hacks in a nutshell: you have one set of CSS rules that work for IE and another (hidden by way of CSS hacks,) for FireFox and other more compliant browsers. Using CSS hacks is a bad idea (that should have never been suggested) because they depend on something that is ‘broken’.
As an alternative, IE conditional comments make sense because they serve the same purpose as the hacks: to allow us to serve IE only code to IE, and not any other browsers. In addition, IE conditional comments are a feature of IE and not something that is broken.
ON DOCTYPES:
People have written long blathering articles on doctypes and on which ones to use. Being a practically minded person (who keeps reminding my long-winded father to ‘get to the point’,) I wanted to give people the quick- skinny on doctypes:
What are doctypes?
The doctype is a little bit of code that tells the browser how to read your web pages – it tells the browser which (of its many) ‘engines’ to use. As you may have guessed, we have several options.
What doctype should we use in our pages? Your Options:
- HTML 4.01 Strict
- HTML 4.01 Loose
- HTML 4.01 Frameset
You can cut-and-paste any one of these:
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
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Just in case it is not clear, you insert only one (of the doctypes) at the top of your web page. So which one should you use? Use the first one: HTML 4.01 Strict
Final comments:
There are other doctypes but they relate to XHTML … and we know that you shouldn’t use XHTML.
Bye for now.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Heretic)
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February 22, 2005
Short answer:
JavaScript is not very important when you look at it from a practical perspective.
OK, why?
Simple really- about 10% of the people on the Internet have their JavaScript turned off – they’re afraid that it might pose some security risk.
Even though that fear is unjustified, the fact remains that you can’t depend on JavaScript working for a significant audience. That means you can’t use JavaScript for any critical work on a public website.
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February 21, 2005
The Zen of CSS Design uses websites (derived from the CSS Zen Garden website,) to teach CSS based layout along with a smattering of other web design topics.
NOTE: many of the techniques described in this book depend on hacks that we now know will cause big problems with the next Web Standards compliant version of IE – IE7 will break many common CSS hacks. So don’t buy this book for the CSS advice since it is riddled with the use of hacks.
If you’re really into the ‘design’ aspect of web design, you may want to consider this book.
Note: this is not a beginners book, you need to be comfortable with CSS and HTML/XHTML.
This book reminds of Eric Meyers glossy books on CSS except:
- This book deals with design principles as they relate to web design. Where Meyer’s books are more about the ‘nuts and bolts’ of CSS layout.
- The websites showcased are stunning.
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February 21, 2005
In a nutshell: This is a great book for web designers with some experience.
The book’s content is organized into what they call ‘secrets’. A typical ‘secret’ may be few paragraphs to at most, a couple of pages.
This makes it a handy desk reference, as it’s packed with very useful snippets of information that are presented in a concise manner – the author gets to the point quickly.
What does the book cover:
- The ‘tools’ that a web designer can choose from.
- Usability – how to make your websites easier to use.
- Website project management – this chapter was a little boring for me.
- Scripting – but many of the sample scripts are little weak.
- CSS – good discussions of the practical use of CSS.
- Making websites accessible.
- XHTML and HTML – again dealing with the questions people have today.
- and much more.
When it makes sense, there are good examples with each ‘secret’.
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I highly recommend this book for active web designers.
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February 20, 2005
Preamble: This is an older post, but it is still accurate:
The short answer: These days, the line between a scripting language and a programming language is blurred. As such, in practical application, the differences are meaningless. So the answer is: no.
Some details … what a nerd might tell you: Scripting or writing scripts, is programming within a program. Traditionally you would write scripts to automate certain functionality within another program. Traditionally scripts would have very specific task like for example: reading a text file to extract all the email addresses.
Why use a scripting language?
- Easy to learn – compared to traditional programming languages.
- It takes much less code to do something with scripting than when using a traditional programming language.
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