Wysiwyg

Steve-Hostirian said:
Not the way the world works. Full service to you may mean different things to different clients. Impartial reviews? From who?
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Full service as respected HTML/XHTML/CSS... standards, regardless of whether the client is satisfied with the site's exterior or not (while under the hood site is just a generic DW mash of non-sense, just waiting to fall apart when edited).

Impartial review from the W3C markup/css validator. This is an obvious black'n'white answer if you ask me.
 
Amdinistrator said:
Full service as respected HTML/XHTML/CSS... standards, regardless of whether the client is satisfied with the site's exterior or not (while under the hood site is just a generic DW mash of non-sense, just waiting to fall apart when edited).

Impartial review from the W3C markup/css validator. This is an obvious black'n'white answer if you ask me.
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Sorry - I take very little for granted. :D Yes, W3C validation would be nice. Here's my take - that's not going to happen anytime soon. For those who know how to design with validation, this simply means continued job security.
 
Websites from a business point of view are often the be all and end all, usually as like any aspect of a business this is your appearance to the world and it is on that respect, to the world due to the global nature of the internet. :uhh:

As such most companies will employ a designer, coder and or project manager to complete a large corporate website. But smaller companies or individuals will often take it upon themselves to use front page (which I now believe is being merged into visual developer or with the express applications) and or other off the shelve applications.

I have before advised a number of these companies and there are numerous reasons, such as “id like to be able to edit and expand it myself” or “id like to be able to update or learn...” however their big downfall that I’m almost always consulted on is page rank, never W3C as they generally consider that secondary or unimportant when doing the “do it yourself” approach.

However there are ways around it, I myself am a big fan of empowering and teaching those who want to “do it themselves” as this is how and where most if not all of use aquired our core experience. Many CMS’s a favourite being Joomla give the user the power to edit their site almost entirely, and do add the ability to edit the meta details to effect ranking to some degree. Others however are diabolical in all aspects of web design and coding.

A number of companies, large news sites and even hosts in some cases use CMS’s because of this, as hard coding isn’t for everyone, but as far as editors go there are so many alternatives.

I personally use Dreamweaver, and a local server to test everything, keeping code and live view on separate monitors. I could use notepad but it lacks the ease of use and organisation of Dreamweaver that I like but as I said there are a number of programs and scripts that are for everyone as the master collection from adobe is on the steep side. That said codeignitor (online php library and environment) is an example of another
 
Steve-Hostirian said:
For those who know how to design with validation, this simply means continued job security.
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What I don't understand is that it's not difficult to validate. Sure, if you buy a template and W3 tells you you've got 200 errors you're pretty much screwed, but W3 tells you what the problem is, and after fixing a few sites with validation issues you're bound to remember what not to do.

One problem could stem from not understanding what doc types accept what. So with that in mind I can understand why some seasoned designers have some trouble with past habits, and n00bs do just fine. But honestly, everyone in IT knows you've got to keep up to date with continued training.
 
Steve-Hostirian said:
Sorry - I take very little for granted. :D Yes, W3C validation would be nice. Here's my take - that's not going to happen anytime soon. For those who know how to design with validation, this simply means continued job security.
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I agree, this is actually very simple. I'm not one of those who say that validation comes before satisfying the client, but I have never encountered a client who requests bad coding :D Until then, I'm just coding by the rules and we're all happy :D
 
Amdinistrator said:
I agree, this is actually very simple. I'm not one of those who say that validation comes before satisfying the client, but I have never encountered a client who requests bad coding :D Until then, I'm just coding by the rules and we're all happy :D
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In that case just to spice things up a bit I need you to work on one of my projects. Need a minimum of 100 errors, and it has to look completely different in every browser :)
 
siforek said:
In that case just to spice things up a bit I need you to work on one of my projects. Need a minimum of 100 errors, and it has to look completely different in every browser :)
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HAHAHA! It sounds like I should be paying you for this job! :D

But really, wouldn't it be nice to encounter such client, oh boy oh boy :D
 
I just remembered once how I told a client that his site would take two to three weeks to be built. The friend who heard about CSS twice in his life said to me later, "man I can do that site in 3 days". So much about quality and weekend designers...
 
Amdinistrator said:
I just remembered once how I told a client that his site would take two to three weeks to be built. The friend who heard about CSS twice in his life said to me later, "man I can do that site in 3 days". So much about quality and weekend designers...
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There's nothing wrong with weekend designers IMO, but you've got to have the experience first. It's funny how so many people think this is so easy, and while what was once difficult is now easy, there's so much more to it than most think.

Recently a family member brought to me a friend of theirs looking for some work. My cousin said "I've seen him make a website like myspace in like 3 hours!".. I then asked if it actually functioned, and she agreed. I thought to myself, "he's probably got a clone script"..

Long story short, he had spent a couple hours saving all the myspace pages(html) and then used NVU to change the logo.. He asked me why the links weren't working and I told him he had a "id 10t" error. I haven't called him since :)
 
OMG is that really true? I guess you can't be surprised these days very much.

OK, since we are sharing stories, here's another one. When I published one of my sites couple of years ago I send mass mail to all my friends about the news with link to site included. So, one of my friends was in some evening school about web design. He though my email was invitation to a review so he did a review of my site, from a "professional's" point of view. Although my design was OK, he implied how many tactical and logical mistakes I've made when structuring the site. His email was finished with a question: "Have you heard about keywords, did you implement those? You know, you will have many benefits if you put those on your site". Apparently keywords is something that you have to put on your site additionally. Well, live and learn...
 
Web design is a learning process, even for the experts. Its one of the things I like about the industry. There is so much you can do with design creatively, that you'll never run out of new angles. The saying at the top of my calendar reads, "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." That definitely fits web design.
 
Steve-Hostirian said:
Web design is a learning process, even for the experts. Its one of the things I like about the industry. There is so much you can do with design creatively, that you'll never run out of new angles. The saying at the top of my calendar reads, "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." That definitely fits web design.
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Agreed. Not just design, but development. I'm not the greatest designer, but when it comes to math, logic, and custom functions I've been very "creative" if that's the world for it. Maybe "resourceful" fits better.

That's another thing I love about the industry. Resources have a big part. I could argue that I intuitively know google search logic better than anyone I know. There's all these design/development classes friends of mine have gone to and their crutch is their instructor. They say "I'll ask when I get to class" I say "I'll ask google right now".

What I'm saying is that you can teach yourself. There's no better resource than the internet. Although some instruction/mentor would help.. It's trial and error for the most part that propels your skills.
 
That's another thing I love about the industry. Resources have a big part. I could argue that I intuitively know google search logic better than anyone I know. There's all these design/development classes friends of mine have gone to and their crutch is their instructor. They say "I'll ask when I get to class" I say "I'll ask google right now".
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So now you can Google or Bing it. :)
 
Steve-Hostirian said:
Web design is a learning process, even for the experts. Its one of the things I like about the industry. There is so much you can do with design creatively, that you'll never run out of new angles. The saying at the top of my calendar reads, "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." That definitely fits web design.
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Id agree as well on that one, as a programmer there is no end to solutions to one single problem and with a large number of less experienced users using various scripts to power their websites, they will use other peoples solutions to ultimately find the one that works for them (plug-ins etc).

There’s a lot to learn as both a coder and a user, a number of days ago someone suggested phpbb portal that solved an issue id faced with a site, where as I intended to create a CMS registration system to solve the issue.. which i may still do but again even the most experienced will learn something from those less experienced.

Nice to see it works full circle :)
 
God I hate WYSIWYG editors. I just bought a site that used one and I had to basically reconstruct everything in pure code so I could do everything I wanted. Ridiculous.
 
lol, my husband is still a Dreamweaver fan. I've weaned myself off it unless I'm explaining something to him or helping him with the site I built for the lodge. He admins it and converted it to a nice, simple dreamweaver file so he can update it in about 2mins tops. Still makes me itch to "fix" things some days. I just close my eyes and am thankful he is the admin and not one of the old guys who thinks tons of animated gifs and background music is "cool" :disagree:

I never liked the pages Front Page made and when I started learning design tons of people used it. So I sucked up and learned it all by hand, starting with making a sentence on a page, changing the page color, font color, making it bold, adding a background pic, making a table, etc. I progressed along with the coding, from HTML to CSS. I can make a decent page and make it compliant more often than not. I charge a small token for the pages I've made and it includes a tutorial to update it yourself and imbedded notes to help if you get lost if you want/need them.

I don't look down on those who use WYSIWYG editors, nor do I consider them better or worse than hand coding. Not everyone can recall all the coding necessary by heart. So long as the client is happy and the page works who's to say one way is better?

I've had clients running Win 95 and IE from the dark ages who only cared that the page looked good on their computer....heck with the modern fools with Win XP and IE8.:uhh:
 
I tend to agree, it's hard to define what is a full service. Most important thing in any business is to do what both sides have agreed on, this is where one should pay attention to the tiniest details of the agreement.
 
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