No, this isn’t a post about being stalked in the Library of Congress, or the British Library. It’s about Web developers being encouraged to look backward rather than forward.
‘How-to’ books and online tutorials encourage it. Authoring tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive include it automatically. Even my beloved HomeSite+ assumes you will want it as an option.
What is it? (more…)
(This heartfelt plea is not addressed to any current client of mine. Readers—especially fellow-designers—will get the point.)
I am pleased to be working with you on your new Web site. Your business is one that anyone would be pleased to be associated with.
My number one aim is to produce a site that you yourself are proud of. Since I am an inventive visual designer, and I have worked as a professional programmer, and I am at home with all the relevant tools and technologies—Flash, Photoshop, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, MySQL, you name it—this should be within our reach.
There is one thing, however, I cannot do without: a bit of your time. For one thing in particular. I need to know everything you really want from your site.
You can talk freely to me: I am a trained listener, too. Maybe the bottom line is that you want to have something to show off; maybe it’s that you don’t really care what the site looks like, as long as people visit and click through (i.e., make you money). Maybe you really want visitors to know something that you care about. Whatever. You have your own, perhaps very personal, hopes. I need you to share them with me. (I will not pass on anything you tell me.)
I also need to know the sites that impress you, and (most important) what impresses you about them.
I am a good listener, and I know how to carry out instructions. But I can’t read minds. You are a very busy person, I appreciate—but I can’t give you what you want without a bit of your time.
Best wishes,
Michael
I promised when I began this blog that I’d put longer and more substantial stuff onto the main Web Costa Blanca site, in the form of articles and tutorials. I’ve just written a longish article on screen resolutions in Web design which draws on nearly eighteen months of collecting the screen resolutions of visitors to my personal site.
(How do you do that? If you’re interested, post a comment, and I’ll put the code in this blog.)
I thought to begin with that the issue of screen resolutions was a bit of a nightmare for universal Web design. As I worked on the article I became more and more aware that my original thought hadn’t taken in the full complexity of the situation. If you look at the article, called Web page design—is it possible?, you may see what I mean.
I’m going to publish at least one follow-up article. There are some widely published solutions—but do they really meet our difficulties as designers? Can you help?
No, there isn’t a typo in the title (this time). These are the very words which confront any visitor to the English homepage of the Barclays Bank website here in Spain. They are part of an animated ad for the bank’s deposit account.
Of course, as any English speaker will spot immediately, there’s a mistake. ‘Trouble’, at least in this context, is not a countable noun, like ‘eye’ or ‘mistake’. It’s what linguists call a “massâ€, or uncountable noun. (Think of ‘love’, which is not countable, and ‘kisses’—which are.) You can’t have ‘a’ trouble focusing.
I mentioned a few days ago that there are close on a million native English-speakers here in Spain. So why didn’t the bank—or the copywriters—run the text past one of them? Any English-speaker would spot the mistake instantly, without any special linguistic knowledge. They would just know that it “wasn’t right.â€
I’m sure this sort of thing happens all over the world, wherever a native institution displays something in what, for it, is a foreign language. But you wouldn’t expect it on the Web page of a major institution here in Spain, when you could wander out into the street and find someone who spoke the relevant language.
Extraño, ¿no?
A few moments ago, I came across the blog of a fellow Web developer, in which he said he had questioned a client’s tool of choice—HomeSite.
I spent good money on a bells-and-whistles up-to-date Dreamweaver,
but I keep wondering when it will be useful. Please, somebody tell me! I use HomeSite—or HomeSite+, which has been around for three or four years, and may be the end of the line—for all my Web development. In fact, I am writing these words in HomeSite right now, before uploading them to my server.
It turned out that my fellow developer got on well with HomeSite: he says, “HomeSite is a superior product for hard coding web sites .†And then he says, “it is best to work with developing technologies rather than dying ones. I would have to say that that rules out HomeSite.†(more…)
A couple of months ago, I was chatting to a taxi driver when he told me that some recent ‘fares’—I think that’s what you call a taxi driver’s customers—had told him off for speaking Spanish, and for not knowing their language. (To keep the record straight, I should say that they weren’t English.) I would hate any reader of this blog to suppose that an attitude like this informed my earlier post on Internet Explorer, or Brenda’s comment on PayPal.
As I’ve said in previous posts, the first challenge for design is to think about purpose and use, and who you want to visit. (Which needn’t be anything heavy: the main purpose of a site might be to have visitors rolling off their adjustable chairs.)
At some point, however, you have to think about the home page. For what it’s worth, this is the way I do things.
I sketch. (more…)
Readers of this blog will notice that there are separate categories for ‘Web design’ and ‘Web development’. This is a distinction which is often made in unhelpful ways. Some people think of Web design as a form of graphic design—arranging text, images and other graphical elements on a Web page. The same people think of Web development as programming/coding/scripting.
Both ideas are too narrow. And with narrow views of the activities, we get the relationship between them wrong. Artist works in own sweet way, then hands stuff over to Engineer, who does the dull work of coding.
In my last post I referred to a couple of books. I thought people might like to know where to get hold of books on the Costa Blanca.
There are several English bookshops, but far and away the best—for my money—is the LibrerÃa Europa in Calpe, run by Gil. He can order just about any book you’ve ever heard of—and he is an ace at tracking down books which are out of print.
Gil is a character in his own right, so the bookshop—just off Calpe’s main shopping street—is definitely worth a visit. For further details you can check out the LibrerÃa Europa website.
I love the visual side of design. And, like everyone, I am attracted to visually appealing sites. However, even if I have some visual ideas which really excite me, I do not work on them when I am first designing a site. The most important first step, I would argue, is to work out how the site could best be structured. Before visual design comes site design.