What is Digg?163 Comments
- Lurz, on 10/12/2007, -16/+54This is a pompus rant.
- ZenKai, on 10/12/2007, -1/+36You know, this is a sore point for a lot of us developers. How many of you have had to repair the damage (or replace the entire app) because the client's friend/neighbor/niece/etc. took a semester in HTML at the local community college? It's getting so we've got a rep like used car salesmen!
- ScottJG, on 10/12/2007, -6/+36"Nobody knows good web design except for me"
Anyone else get that vibe from this guy? - atomicpoet, on 10/12/2007, -1/+29The thing is, HTML is easy. All you need is knowledge of a few tags to build a webpage. It's only when you get into Flash, AJAX, and CSS that you really do need competency. Of course this says nothing about basic design (or, how not to use black fonts on dark backgrounds).
The other side of the coin is that most people don't have a good sense of design. The reason why so many people on MySpace have such hideous profiles is because they are convinced it looks beautiful. - Chewie67, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20Been there, done that -- hundreds of time.
The fact is, MANY companies don't value their web site. They want cheap. Period. So, they hire the owner's neighbor's 16 year old kid to build them a web site. He does it in Word or FrontPage, and it looks like....a 16 year old did it.
Then he heads off to college a few years later, the company wants changes made, and they're stuck. They call here, say "I need changes made." I tell them "You need a new web site", and they choke at the price. Why? Because they don't see anything wrong with their ugly, broken-link filled web site. They don't want to spend money on it. They don't "Get It" - electrichead, on 10/12/2007, -10/+29... and narcissistic to boot
- Vokas, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15I don't know who whines more about amatures...web or graphic designers, if your good enough, you'll get business.
- kevbryant, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19whiny wuss - the only kind of designer who would write this is someone who feels threatened by people who design that way. if you can't compete with slice designers, then either you don't know how to market yourself, or you can't design. its one thing to know how to code everything from scratch and quite another to understand the elements of design. put the both of them together and you've got a good glass of lemonade. but if you think your little "crusade" to "educate" the client is going to make you money, have fun with that. no one wants to be taught by some designer who can throw around buzzwords he read on digg. there is a reason the statement is "the customer is always right"- because when it comes down to brass tacks, client is king, and you're just a tool they use. i get the feeling that anyone who rants about wannabe designers is just pissed because they think they're working so hard, and haven't been successful.
AND who the hell is going to rant about design on a DEFAULT WORDPRESS THEME! My mom could install wordpress.
DON'T WHINE- If you can design, f*$kin PROVE IT. - cmiz, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15I've never taken a class in web design and I have 3 "professional" friends who are web designers by trade. They all use Dreamweaver and frequently send me pages to debug because when it comes to actually coding XHTML/CSS, they're essentially fish out of water. Funny how that sort of thing works out, huh? (I'm a programmer, mostly C++ and assembly, and HTML isnt exactly a difficult language to pick up for those of us used to code.)
With the way things are going in the World of WYSIWYG, all you really NEED to be is a good graphic designer in order to make money as a web designer. Now if you want to be a GOOD web designer and work for a big company that need lean code or any sort of web applications, that idea falls apart. - Moocat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11His story obviously hit some sore spots (just look at some of the comments here) but whether or not you like it, he speaks the truth. I've seen a web shop grow from what basically amounted to script kiddies to a full blown programming shop and the difference was HUGE. In fact, I fell right into that PHP programmer example up until a few months ago. I quite literally had to unlearn pretty much everything I had learned through PHP. Despite the fact I could create a browser-based game in PHP in no time, I did not have the first real clue as to how things really worked in a real programming language.
Another person in my area who was learning Java from the same person at the same time who had no prior PHP experience learned it TWICE as fast. In my opinion, yes, you can make good pages overall with things such as PHP, FLASH, Colfusion, etc. but you won't do so if that's your only background in programming. No offense meant, but he's right, a large portion of the "designers" out there are better off doing just that, "designing", not programming. Take a C#, .NET or Java class so you can see the difference between the two. - computerologist, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10These are the sites this guy works/worked for.
http://www.christianendeavor.com/
http://www.barbourbooks.com/
Those who live in poorly designed glass houses, shouldn't be throwing such large stones? - quamb, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9haha so true.
one point - Design and programming are two very different things. And good design vs good code, my friends, is also two very different things.
If you can merge the two, great, but life aint so peachy all the time. - ejschaefer, on 04/16/2008, -3/+10try fixing a page that someone made with word, now that's an adventure
- btipling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6This is a great article, except that bit about PHP. Mixing up markup and code is undesireable, but that can be done with any programming language (mixing up logic and display/design/structure). Also Yahoo! uses PHP, as well as Wordpress, Drrupal, and a million other sites, and they make very professional products. Who's to argue with that?
- armbar, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10I got the "too many people don't know what they're doing but still call themselves professionals" vibe. He's right though--quite often, my business gets calls to take over a website from another designer, and I can hardly even tell how the pages they create manage to work.
I'm not being pompous, but there really are a lot of so-called professional web design firms that just don't yet have the knowledge to make a well-built, maintainable website. - sandlog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It IS a rant. This will be the 100x someone has to chime in with "i only use notepad to code my sites." I've been working in the web field for 6 years now and can relate to some of the ranting in the article. However, some products, like Dreamweaver and Style Master (for CSS) can be used to achieve VERY professional results. It boils down to how you use them or abuse them.
- ldhertert, on 10/12/2007, -11/+16Lurz - honestly, I think those five words summed it up better than I ever could have.
- Modulo, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10As a graphic designer, I can definately tell you that it's the graphic designers that whine more. We have to. Almost everyone THINKS that they have a flair for design. Very few people actually do. Not everyone thinks they know HTML. Consider yourselves lucky web monkeys!
- astatine, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Yeah, but maintaining the code made with Dreamweaver when you've got hold of the project isn't easy on the eyes - compared with something coded by someone who knew what every bit of code does, and wrote it to be maintained.
Nobody in that line of work uses a "basic" text editor - they use good ones. - pbaehr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Speaking as a designer I can say that a large part of the problem is how mid-level designers approach clients.
The high level designers have the luxury of being able to pick and choose their clients and have established themselves on a level that makes it much easier to convince the client they are worth good money.
Low level designers (12 year olds with Photoshop) will do a job for practically no money and bragging rights.
The mid level designers are focusing too much on competing with the low level designers and not enough on making the move to a higher level.
If a client tells you that his nephew will design his company's webpage for $200 and a bag of chips DON'T TRY TO PRICE MATCH HIM! Instead, use your experience and portfolio (you have those, right?) to convince him that you are worth the extra money and he will benefit in the long run.
Mid-level designers with bad business ethics are hurting this industry far more than the amateurs. They are the biggest risk because some of them actually do decent work. - JoshuaWood, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The thing that I find really frustrating about the whole web designer thing is that I try to educate my clients, I'll go down the list of why they should do this and why they should do that, but ultimatly it's their money and their site. What happens 75% of the time is that we go live with what they want, then 3 months later they pay me again to put in what I advised them to do in the beginning. I've had a few clients that I've had to turn away because they absolutly had to have an entire ecommerce site in flash.
The other critizism I also get is that your sites are so simple, there's not even any flash on them. It's like "Yeah, that's kind of the point, the sites I create are designed for one thing - selling!" Anything that gets in the way of the visitor taking out their credit card and buying something is stripped away. This allows me to have some sites with more than 5% conversion rate on consumer products. Normally you're very lucky to get .075%. So we're talking about at least 5 times the sales from the same traffic. So many people are concerned about the way things look vs. the way they perform. Which is better the greatest looking banner ad ever, that brings in the normal .05% click through, or one that is garish delivering 10% clickthrough. It depends on if you're doing branding or selling, but It's a constant strugle to get clients to focus on the results. The ones that get it are well worth the struggle though. It's amazing whatching them prosper. - empeethree, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4all my pages suck, but they aint going to do themselves!
- pygmalion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5On the other hand, writing down the structure first forces you to actually think about it. It often helps out in the design stage because you know how many layers of styling you will need. Don't forget (X)HTML is not a coding language; it's a markup language.
Writing CSS for a well structured (W3C validation alone does _not_ mean it's well structured ) site is actually very easy and incremental.
If you need the WYSIWYG feel, I suggest having a look at text editors that offer a live web preview. Typically you'll have a window showing a real browser render of the document you're editing and it automatically refreshes on every few keystrokes. They are usually powered by the platform's web SDK ( Webkit on OS X, IE on Win, etc.) and offer a much better preview than tools such as Dreamweaver or GoLive.
That being said, there's one thing I absolutely love about GoLive, and that is Smart Objects. Incredible time saver. It'll link a PSD/AI/PDF file in your page and you can re-rasterize directly from there. It'll also let you change the text it finds in the layers of your PSD file. - masterstephen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5This is the most one side ***** I have ever read. I agree full heartedly that there are a million and half websites out thee that are complete crap, and for everyone of those websites there is a cut and paste script kiddie calling him or her self a programmer. However everything else in this post is wasted disk space…
What about PHP makes it a poor programming language, and in comparison to what? Coldfusion, ActiveScript, .NET, QBASIC, what? PHP is rock solid languages tailored to web programming, any inferences to the contrary only go to prove this authors limited knowledge of programming, and their limited capacity to think. Quite simply: any code written in any language by a bad programmer will result in a bad, slow, insecure application. This has nothing to do with PHP, I’m sure you could find a bad .NET site for every bad PHP site out there.
“Well, first of all, as anyone who’s done much web programming will tell you, mixing code with markup is *not* a good thing if you care about maintenance or extensibility “ - yet another clear example of this authors limited knowledge. Nate – maybe do a little research before posting on your blog! Check out: http://smarty.php.net. Ohh and as far as scalability, extensibility and maintenance goes – how about a little site called http://digg.com. 8.5 million Unique hits in June, do you consider that have limited extensibility?
Speaking of script-kiddies, I notice you are using a Wordpress blog? Did you write this blog and then just put the Wordpress quote on the bottom? Probably not! So you your self are using scripts off the internet, right? By the way nice default theme as well! I noticed this only after I stopped laughing at you for bashing PHP, and then hosting your web site using it as your scripting language. And just for the record – I’m not bashing Wordpress, I love it and I use as well.. I am bashing this ultra l337 programmer, who feels the need to judge everyone else, and doesn’t produce anything better.
In defence of the crappy sites on the internet, have we all not once put out at least one crappy site? Everyone’s first site was crap, everyone’s! Maybe these crappy sites are their first try, no one is perfect.
Lastly, a little English lesson for you; “Sadly the term ‘web designer’ has generally come to be accepted as someone who makes websites.” – By definition that would constitute a web designer, maybe not a GOOD web designer but a web designer none the less.
You know what pisses me off? People that post on their blog and have no clue what they are talking about! My suggestion to you Nate is to cancel your hosting account!
Master Stephen. - psyanyde, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5kevbryant- The only kind of designer who would write something like this is any real designer who has ever gotten a new client that wants to change their existing Frontpage created site. There is much more to good web design than the ability to create a page. There is more to it than having a good eye for design. A good designer should be able to create a good looking site with clean and slim code, that sits at a comfortable ranking on Google, and can be edited quickly and easily.
Also, if you think you never have an obigation as a designer to educate the client, then I am convinced you do not actually work in web design, and really have no basis for your opinion. For example, I had a client who wanted to revamp their site. Their main goal was to increase traffic to the site, but around 10 minutes into the meeting they explained that they really wanted the site to be made entirely in Flash. The customer can't always be right if they don't know what they are talking about. Once I explained how search engines work, and took time to educate the client, they realized that a few Flash elements embedded in an HTML page would actually be much better for their needs. I didn't make as much money off of the project, and the client didn't get what they originally wanted, but as a designer I feel that it is my duty to help the client understand exactly what they are getting into. - yomomo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4every website sucks ecept the ones I build. All tools suck except the ones I use. All languages suck except the ones I use.
- iamdecal, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7if he's such a ***** hot designer, you'd think he might change the "default blog template" look just a little....
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3> A REAL web designer would have written his own content management system, but without php.
Sorry, but that's the attitude of a kid with a hobby, not a professional designer with a job. A professional designer realises that there's better things to spend their time on than coding a weblog when there's already a decent one freely available. - RickySan65, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"I work at Bluehost.com and hear calls every ***** day about down syndrome "web designers" not knowing how to upload or go through FRONTPAGE! good god. I swear I wanna kill all of them"
Wow, now there's some positive marketing for bluehost, the company that wants to kill their customers, great move there sparky. Wont be hosting there anytime soon - Picard102, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Maybe to you its not appealing, but to the 12 year old girls it might be. Your probably not the target market.
- Moocat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think the point he was trying to make is most people abuse them. Which was at one time true in my area and I'm sure many others.
- ramd3z, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Our graphic designers (all 2 of them) consume more resources then 4 times the rest of our staff. The head designer has a dell precision, g4, g5 and a 24" LCD, and we just had to buy a powervault b/c we ran out of space. 80gigs of storage for them, and 20gigs of storage for the remaining ~45 staff. So I'd say our designers complain more, b/c the developers are just told, NO, you don't need that. Sigh, i can hear her now..complaining.....
- BigPapi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3When I started building websites, I never charged anybody for it because I knew it was crap. I was in it for the learning experience. People were just happy to have something on the web and I was content since I really enjoyed building them. I personally find it fun to take a crap website and make it more efficient, secure and appealing. But that's just me.
- althe3rduww, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I think what defines this articles author is...
"I don't know how to do flash, AJAX, CSS so I am going to bash anyone who uses those technologies extensively on a website. And to yap about it I will just pick the default theme on wordpress and type in my rant in a WYSIWIG type fashion. Yay me!"
Seriously, most of the people that I hear bash flash, AJAX, etc don't know how to code in them. - pbaehr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@CarbonFree:
I am using the "levels" to describe degrees of experience.
When I say "High Level" I am referring to the big guys with nice corporate accounts and a very established reputation.
When I say "Mid Level" I am referring to designers with a moderate amount of experience who haven't established themselves yet and are still building a reputation and account base.
When I say "Low Level" I am referring to people with no experience, no reputation, and skills usually limited to the technical area of design.
I never said that someone who's new to the game lacks talent. I've known many extremely talented students at all different ages. It's not a matter of talent, in my point, so much as experience. That being said, even a talented teenager who is underselling his work hurts the profession. What I am trying to stress is that it's not the quality of work that's hurting designers, it's bad business practices. - tehnico, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3There is a fundamental difference between a Designer, someone who designs a web page, a Web Designer, and a Web Developer.
1) A designer while can be a broad term, usually falls back on, and is a term used primarily by print designers. A whole 'nother ball o' wax that I am not going to get into here.
2) Someone who designs a web page is either someone who has no experience designing web pages but feels they have a flare for aesthetics. Or they are a Designer that thinks their skill transcends genres. These are the deplorable people web designers despise.
3) A web designer is someone who understands code, usability, and design. They can, more often then not, make a much more stunning website then the previous two. Most of the time they are integral to the production of the website as well. They draw up the creative. They are usually the XHTML/CSS writers, and they leave the server side code, template systems, ecom packages, dynamic content loading, server application portions to the Web Developers. Depending on the skill of the web designer, they can perform some basic php tasks. Date functions, if statements and variable play. If this is the case, they usually are very astute as some action script applications, and are able to create a number of flash pieces.
4) Web developers perform the essential server side/dynamic aspects of the site mentioned in number 3. Sometime however they fill the shoes of the web designers depending on the company, in so much as they code the XHTML/CSS as well. If this is the case then the company usually outsources the creative to number 2 on the list, and the developer then interprets the creative into a functional site.
That's my experience anyway. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5I love it how he wants to tell customers what they want. Idiot.
You give the customer what he wants, no matter how terrible it is.
Good thing you dont own a barbershop. I can see it already.
Customer: I need my hair cut. Shave 1 side, but leave the other side how it is.
Him: No man, you need to get a mohawk. Its cool!
Customer: Just cut my damn hair bitch.
LOL - windycityguy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4"I get the most chuckle from discussions surrounding this area."
What skills you have in web design are clearly lacking in sentence construction. - Grimboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You are not incapable of finding the vast amount of information on these things (some of which django has built in protection against) using a search engine.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5What exactly does Dreamweaver have to do with it? We use it at our company to develop and FTP between local - live servers, and write all code.. coder view of course.. it's just efficient like that.
- Flynnz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2hehe again we seem to be arguing different points on a lot of things...perhaps this is my fault. perhaps not. However I really dont have time to go through everything on your reply. (with work and all)
But Let me just say you seem to misunderstand what I was saying in regards to CSS. I use CSS all the time, and its fantastic. If you read what I was saying I was talking about using CSS/DIV's for LAYOUT specifically. I still dont think that ASPECT of css is ready for primetime. I have nothing against it for future projects, but I still think that its not ready. (believe me when I tell you I am not alone in thinking this.....cruise through many a dev board and read) But with that said. you made it sound as if I said using CSS in general is bad...this is simply not true. I use it on everything, and love it. I couldnt imagine doing web design without it.
and again I dont see a point in providing links to sites that I have worked on...If I was bragging about my skillz or something I would see the point...The sole purpose of my initial statement was to say that DW can and is used on major sites (cause you made the assumption that I never worked in a corporate enviroment).......I dont think this statement is such a stretch that it needs to have links to back it up...do you? What you are really asking for is a link to a site so that you can try and pick it apart for your argument...well let me save you time, there are mistakes I am sure. Some mine, some from others. Thats just the nature of working on large sites. So again I dont see any reason what-so-ever to post sites I have worked on other than the fact it will make you happy to pick them apart. And again that would reflect negatively on my clientscompanies I work for, and would be unprofessional. and no I dont have a blog cause I am not that self involved :) And my "portfolio" site has a list of my clients so...yeah that would be the same as me posting links to those sites here.
So I just wanted to clarify those things I am sorry that I dont have time to reply to other stuff. (which I get the feeling we will just keep going back and forth on forever on anyway hehe)
thanks for the action.....and keep on rockin! - armbar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3That wasn't much of a cycle, unless you're saying that people who know Dreamweaver flame people who hack OpenBSD.
- Agret, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"That serentiy buzz is fugly."
I think it's the best design i've seen from the guy and it's actually a very nice layout IMHO - Snakedal337, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I found a few of his sites...
http://www.serenitybuzz.com/
http://www.barbourbooks.com/
(via: http://www.w3csites.com/profile.asp?u=nateklaiber From Google search for Nate Klaiber)
That serentiy buzz is fugly. - zcreem, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I ONLY use Textpad, I can't even spell WYSIWYG (the spell checker will fix it).
Seriously, whatever gets the job done and your most comfortable with, you don't get the same hands dirty feeling with wisywatsit though.
As for work, hey it's luck, contact, and a portfolio. Price, that's negotiable. - Flynnz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Oh and I would also like to point out that I have had to fix many a web page by people who THOUGHT they knew how to write code in notepad. Broken tags, horrible tabbing (if any), old school tags that dont work correctly on different browsers and many other problems that are amateur. I will take some HTML made from DW over these idiots any day. (though I still think you should ultimately learn the markup...its pretty damn easy after all)
Bottom line is, just cause you use notepad, does not mean you know what you are doing. ANY can make crap pages in anything. - Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2> I am getting into PHP, and only beginning to learn about "SQL injection, Header injection, Session hijacking, XSS, CSRF" etc. Perhaps if he were to give a few hints about what these are, just to get me thinking em, the 5 minutes wouldn't have been so wasted.
There's this magical thing you might have heard of called a search engine. You can plug any of those terms into a search engine and get lots of good information on the first page of results.
Why on earth would he include explanations of what various security vulnerabilities are when that wasn't the point of the article and is easily found by anybody even remotely familiar with the WWW? - cmiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@sbrown
--You newbs drive me nuts.--
Not sure why that was appropriate, but no, I'm not a web developer by profession. I'm a programmer, as mentioned before.
--CSS and XHTML are NOT coding! Talk about Ruby, JSP, ASP, Actionscript, and hell even Javascript and your talking about coding.--
I do code. I code a lot. I code in C++ and ARM (some Java when absolutely necessary). Is that not coding either? I actually use Ruby (sans rails) as well.
I used the term "coding" to mean "writing web pages using hypertext markup language in a text editor as opposed to using a visual based web editor". Sorry if you don't agree with using that term in such a fashion, but for the sake of brevity, I think I'll stick with it.
--WTF? No, C++ and assembly are NOTHING like HTML, XHTML, or CSS. NOTHING!!! HTML is NOT a language! Apples and oranges people.--
I didn't want to say it and start a flame war, but ok, HTML is like programming for retards. Anybody that programs in C++ (or a similar language) can pick up HTML in short order. HTML is, at heart, a really really dumbed down scripting language. I WOULD compare the two, because the linear logic and idea of flow is pretty much the same for all languages.
Out of curiousity, what is your background in web development and programming? - iBran, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The default Wordpress theme is attractive and functional. A blog's most important feature is its CONTENT, even for a critique on design.
By the way, even if your "mom could install wordpress"--that doesn't really have anything to do with designing a theme, does it? - RickySan65, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"You newbs drive me nuts. CSS and XHTML are NOT coding! Talk about Ruby, JSP, ASP, Actionscript, and hell even Javascript and your talking about coding"
Nope, thats scripting, not coding.. sounds like you need to get back to school too.. -
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