Quasi-Evil

Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’

Thesis, Thesis, Wherefore Art Thou?

Everyone is talking about Thesis. Everyone (and everyone knows that when you say ‘everyone’, what you actually mean is ‘a few people, but a few very loud and repetitive people whose opinions I value’).

They rave about it. They go on about how it’ll make your life easier, how it’ll improve your work flow, make friends for you, influence people and bring you a cup of coffee in the morning.

They show its wonderful flexibility, how you’ll never have to change your code again. All you have to do is push some buttons on the options page and play with your CSS. It’s so simple and wonderful and magnificent.

And you know what effect that has? You know what it does?

It makes me really bloody jealous. I want Thesis dammit. So the links in this post are affiliate links. Since Thesis is so epically awesome, you clearly want to buy a copy and it would be the most awesome thing in the universe if you could do it via these links because then I might actually have some money to spend on a copy for myself.

And then if there’s any money left over, I’ll spend it on food. Priorities and stuff.

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The Basic Concepts of Web Design

If you had to explain the basic concepts of web design to people who will be producing web pages with little or no knowledge of design, where would you begin?

Basic accessibility would have to come into it but I think the concept of separating content from styling may be too much. Is just explaining about screen readers and being able to increase font sizes enough?

I think it’s important to cover the big no-nos like iframes (and possibly frames), tables, image maps (because there’s no way they’ll work on image replacement techniques) with some suggestions on how to do it right. Anything else for that list?

Anyone know how easy Frontpage (or whatever the current Microsoft Office programme is) makes it to do these things?

Also, SEO. How do you put ways to increase your traffic into terms that someone who doesn’t know what a meta-tag is can understand?

When I figure all this out, there may be an article.

A Thought on Opinions

So Jem puts up a new layout and what do we all do? Offer constructive criticism. She didn’t ask for it but we always do it regardless. Most people consider Jem to be pretty damn good at what she does and yet we still offer our opinion on her layouts, sometimes scathing, sometimes annoyingly nice. I’m not saying this annoys Jem (I have no idea how she feels about it), nor does it annoy me (heck, I do it), but sometimes I wonder what it is about commenting on blogs that makes us feel so free to offer constructive criticism when we so often shy away from it in ‘real life’. Is it the confidence of anonymity? The fact that we don’t know these people; where normally we’d worry about offending someone, on the internet, everyone’s fair game and if they get upset about it, well, then we’ll have some new drama to giggle about and argue over.

And why do people (like me) who have no real design credentials for people like Jem to base the value of our opinions on, feel we have the right to criticise (constructively) a designer that we admire?

ETA: Jem’s just an example incidentally, feel free to mentally replace her name with any designer you admire who you’ve shared opinions with on their layout.

Web Designers are not Print Designers

I try to avoid calling myself a web designer because I don’t do it very often, tend not to finish any of the web design projects I start and am not especially good at it but I do, from time to time, design webpages so logically, I’m sort of a web designer. But if I worry that I shouldn’t call myself a web designer, it’s nothing compared to the extent that I am not a print designer.

For the group events project at uni (the one that has other people’s lack of design skills, comment for the password, stressing me out), we have to produce a group portfolio so given I’m the only person with any handle of design aesthetics, the task has fallen to me. Fortunately, that bit’s pretty much finished but we also have a presentation to do on Tuesday as if we were presenting to potential sponsors. Which means in addition to making up a three minute+ speech about something that really doesn’t require three minutes (we have to fill 20 minutes as a group and there’s six of us, it’s a stupid hoop that we have to jump through), I’m also producing the sponsorship proposal booklet.

On these two projects alone, I worked out this morning that I’d spent over 36 hours doing them (it’s more but I got bored with counting at 36), plus another four this afternoon and I’m about to go back to it and get it finished. That’s not counting the additional time I’ve spent e-mailing the rest of the group asking where their contributions are and editing the stuff they’ve sent which mostly hasn’t been in a suitable format. Don’t get me wrong, 4 out of 5 of them are hard workers, they just don’t have any knowledge in this area and it turns out that I do. I hope. I guess we’ll see once we get our grade.

Once this is done, I have to start work (well, continue work) on the website. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m going to manage content and currently am planning on using Drupal although I’m considering ExpressionEngine, but I’d need to buy a license to get the functionality I need. I’ve trawled through huge numbers of Drupal modules to shortlist the ones to look at in more detail so now it’s a case of finalising what I need, getting them up and running to my liking and then making it look pretty. It needs to go live in December and I’ve got a provsional date in my head of the 7th, here’s hoping it doesn’t take me as long as the print design has.