Real World Web Design
October 23, 2006
One question that comes up every so often is whether you need a degree to get a web design job?
The short answer to this is: it depends!
THE TOP 3 FACTORS IN GETTING WEB DESIGN JOB
When I’m talking about a web design job, I am not talking about becoming a contractor or opening your own web design business. I am talking about going to work for some company.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, here are the top 3 factors:
- Design ability: can you make the web page look nice.
- Work experience: I’m talking about doing real commercial work; your own pet web projects don’t count.
- A Degree: some sort of IT degree is best but any degree helps.
How important the degree is depends on how big the company is. The larger the company, the more bureaucracy you will have to deal with … that means company policy will factor into this, and that usually means degrees are important.
That said, highly skilled and experienced people can get around this … even in the biggest of companies.
What about coding skills?
Some of you may be asking, how about knowledge of web standards, CSS, HTML? Sadly, the only people who care about those skills are other web designers and to a lessor extent, web programmers.
But why is this so … how can good technical web knowledge be so unimportant? The reason is simple my young weblings:
… the people hiring web designers are looking for design ability and not coding ability. After all, the job title is ‘web DESIGNER’ and not ‘web coder’.
Beyond that, most of the people hiring don’t have a clue about code. They may know a little bit about HTML and CSS, but they would probably have kittens trying to create a hyperlink!
Code-Monkey’s Can’t Design (typically)
Some people enter the web design world only to find out that they can’t design worth a dime … but these same people are typically much better coders. Or as I like to call them: ‘code-monkeys’
You see, if you are a born ‘code-monkey’, chances are you will never be able to design a good looking page … or draw a straight line.
From my 14 years experience doing design and web design work, I’ve found that design ability is something you are born with … you either have it or you don’t, and no amount of training or schooling is going to help you if you don’t have the talent.
With that in mind, it is important that you figure out where your strengths lie and play to them.
… if you are a code-monkey (as I am,) then you need to look into the profession of ‘Web Developer’ and forget about being a ‘Web Designer’.
Web Developer vs. Web Designer
What’s the difference between a web designer and a web developer?
A web developer is someone who builds web applications – sometimes called ‘database driven websites‘.
Esssentially, a web developer is concerned about the functionality of a website and not neccesarily the look. When I’m talking about functionality, I am talking about things like, contact forms, shopping carts and anything else that takes a website from just being a series of pages, to being an engine that preforms some task.
These types of sites are built using languages like PHP, PERL, Ruby and many others.
… read the article on database driven websites for more details.
THE WEB DESIGNERS DESIGN TALENT CHART
I’ve slapped together this web design chart that illustrates how talent relates to your potential of landing a good job. I’ve also included information on when PHP should be considered.
The trick is to figure where you stand on this chart!
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com
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July 31, 2006
When I am talking about ‘stickiness’ (in the context of a website,) I am talking about how long and how often people visit your website.
When you have a real ‘sticky’ website, people will spend more time on it, come back often and will bookmark (add to favorites) your site.
If your website is not sticky, it’s almost pointless to make any effort to get traffic to it.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TO MAKE A WEBSITE STICKIER?
It comes down to a few things:
- Keep the website layout simple.
- Keep the website layout consistent throughout the site.
- Have concise and clear writing.
- Have interesting and entertaining content.
- Stay on topic.
I think the first 4 points speak for themselves – we all know that you should have your ‘home’ button and other navigational elements in the same spot on each page …
That said, I think point #5 needs to be expanded on a little.
WHY STAYING ON TOPIC IS KEY.
One mistake website owners can make, is to try and cover many diverging topics on the same website. This may seem like a good idea, but all it does is confuse your visitors, presents a bigger challenge in terms of organizing the content and finally, it dilutes search engine traffic.
I AM GUILTY OF THIS ERROR
I knew about staying on topic years ago and because of this, I started creating micro-sites that were topic specific. But then, I went nuts …
Killersites.com started to grow in all kinds of directions … soon I had:
- PHP articles
- Photo galleries
- Web design articles
- Web site monitoring
- Page Rank meters
… and all kinds of other stuff.
I should have kept it clean and simple and concentrated on the thing that killersites.com was all about: web design and creating killer websites.
MICRO-SITES
Because of the content-creep found in killersites (it has too much stuff buried in deep dark holes,) I’ve started to create my new and topic specific micro-sites.
Each web site deals with a particular topic and does not diverge. So far I have these websites out:
- www.killerphp.com -> teaches web designers php.
- www.killerajax.com -> teaches you how to use ajax.
- www.killeractionscript -> teaches, yep … Flash Actionscript.
… I still also have the classics:
- www.how-to-build-websites.com
- www.csstutorial.net
- www.secretsites.com
MICRO-SITES ARE ‘STICKIER’
To prove my point, I can share one very interesting web statistic with you: the percentage of people who bookmark my websites.
Consider these numbers:
- killersites.com -> 18%
- how-to-build-websites.com -> 33%
- killerphp.com -> 90%
- csstutorial.net -> 92%
There are many factors that go into affecting these numbers, but a major factor is found in the focus of the content.
For example:
The majority of people bookmark (add to favorites,) killerphp.com because the website is ONLY about php … and that’s why they are there.
Contrast this to killersites.com, where a relatively small number of people bookmark it … we get too many people looking for too many different things … the content is too divergent.
MAKING KILLERSITES.COM STICKIER
It’s not going to be easy, but I am now cleaning things up, moving things to micro-sites, simplifying the pages – sometimes spring-cleaning comes in late summer!
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December 30, 2005
INTRODUCTION
The title of this article is controversial … the truth often is.
In my effort to reveal (what I consider to be) a huge disservice to the web design world, I continue to hammer home the fact that the web standards movement has gone too far – it has promoted bad practices and bad web design.
WEB STANDARDS ARE GOOD … WHEN USED AT THE RIGHT TIME.
Before I go on, I want to stress that I believe web standards are a good thing – it makes sense that browser makers agree on how things should work … it makes web design and web application development much easier and cheaper
That said, let’s try to remember that web design is not a mathematical equation to be balanced (or validated,) it is about creating effective websites that work today!
A LITTLE BACKGROUND.
I was building websites in 1994 back when the W3C was formed. For those of you who may not know, the W3C is an organization put together to define the specifications for web technologies like:
The web standards were created for browser manufacturers to implement and not for web designers. Well … at least not until the browser makers can get their act together and properly support the web standards.
It makes no sense for web designers to try and force web standards based code to work in browsers that don’t support web standards properly.
WEB STANDARDS-CART BEFORE THE BROWSER-HORSE
Those who lead the web standards movement, must have forgotten the wise old proverb: ‘Don’t put the cart before the horse.’
In the context of web design, this means that you shouldn’t try to use technology/techniques and code that is NOT YET supported in the majority of browsers being used. Unfortunately, the web standards movement has done just that, and now there is a cost a lot of people are paying.
THE COST OF ZEALOUS ADHEARENCE TO WEB STANDARDS
In a reality where (currently supported) CSS is not well suited for page-level layouts and buggy/inconsistent implementation between the major browsers (Internet Explorer FireFox,) are a fact of life, designing web sites following the now popular web standard zealot practices, has wasted countless hours for no real benefit.
Consider these facts:
- CSS for layout is not intuitive at all. Since when is: ‘margin:0px auto’ intuitive for creating center aligned layout.
- CSS is buggy and inconsistent between browsers.
- The only true advantage of CSS based layouts is the separation of structure from formatting. This translates into the cross-device compatibility. A questionable need for most websites at this time …
CSS code for page layout stinks in terms of intuitiveness … it is the worst technology for page or user interface layout I’ve ever seen. Anyone who has designed screens with Java or VB knows this. Actually, anyone who has used HTML tables for page layout knows this!
For example:
Creating a center aligned fixed or fluid layout, where the height expands perfectly in all browsers (without the need for hacks) is trivial and intuitive with an HTML table. With CSS, it is a tricky thing that requires hacks.
In fact, a whole culture of ‘hackery’ has developed because of this flaw in the thinking of the web standards zealots – the foolish practice of ‘putting the cart before the horse.’
TROUBLE WITH CSS HACKS
Because of the aforementioned problems with CSS and the browser bugs, hacks have been created to shoe-horn web standards based web sites into working with the browsers. At first glance the hacks seem like a viable solution … but they aren’t.
In fact, hacks should be avoided because CSS hacks rely on ‘broken’ aspects of browsers … things that can get fixed. Any programmer (with just a little experience) knows that basing your work on a broken technology is a recipe for disaster … because things get fixed.
THE DISASTER HAS OCCURED – IE7 WILL BREAK MANY WEBSITES THAT USE THE PROMOTED HACKS
One of the major arguments the web standards movement has used to convince people to ignore reality (the reality that CSS based layouts suck in many ways,) is the famous (infamous) forward-compatibility argument.
The myth of forward compatibility in a nutshell: if you build your sites to standards, they are guaranteed to work in the future.
As it turns out, the first time this argument was put to the test (IE7) it failed miserably. IE7 will be web standards compliant – so much so in fact, that many commonly used CSS hacks will break in IE7, forcing many well meaning web designers to have to go back and change their code – who’s going to pay for that time?
Some web standards zealots might argue that hacks are not ‘really’ promoted by the movement … this simply not true. Every web standards book, every web standards guru mentions, uses and promotes hacks. It too bad, since many web design books published in the last 3 years will have to be trashed since they teach techniques that will break in IE7.
THE SOLUTION
The key to this whole mess is found in common sense and a little experience:
Don’t leverage specifications until they are supported in the browsers.
Ok, how about making things work in both IE and Mozilla based browsers? The best solution is to use IE conditional comments. This is one example where thinking outside the web standards box makes perfect sense.
Stefan Mischook (a.k.a.: the web design heretic)
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September 29, 2005
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WHAT IS AJAX?
What?! You don’t know? And you call yourself a nerd…
AJAX is short for: ‘Asynchronous JavaScript and XML’. AJAX is a combination of technologies that have been around for years.
- HTML/XHTML
- CSS
- DOM
- JavaScript
- XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchro
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From Wikipedia:
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications.
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