The web designers’ worst nightmare…An little funny comic strip based on the web designer and the client.
This is taken from the oatmeal and expresses the frustration all developers/ designers sometimes have with the client.
When it comes to designing everyone knows that not all designs convert to the web. I have experienced in the past where clients who are good designers like to create there own design for us to build. This helps reduce cost on their side because they already have a design in hand. But in a worse case scenario that is not always the case. On average a design from a client can take up to double the time to construct and here’s why……
Cross browser checking, is probably a web developer’s worst enemy. With so many browsers with different versions, different formats. I always dread checking on our system just in case Internet Explorer decides to throw a wobbler. So how important is browser testing? a while back everything was for Internet Explorer and it was a pain visiting a website which disallowed you to view the site without the appropriate browser. While this is till done today it is very bad practice.
At work we not long dropped support for IE 5.5 and now google are now dropping support for IE6 is a very big thing but still government bodies and local councils refuse to upgrade due to the cost of upgrading or just being lazy but they also say that their version of IE6 is more secure because of how the system is locked down restricting what the user can do on the computer.
Luckily now most browsers work pretty much the same within a basic structure. At uc4 ltd we test all browsers from IE6 to FireFox 1 which causes us grief even still. Most audiences now work on IE7 but when creating a site think about your audience, most government, council websites have a standard specification on what is required when developing a site and also the most strict due to guidelines.
To improve cross browser compatibility here are a few tools which can help….
MultipleIE
Stand alone IE browsers to help check capability though, has a few issues with javascript
IE Tester
A tool to check multiple version of IE in one interface
As my Job is an ASP developer but my hobby is PHP I am constantly clashing with many issues between the both. I am working on a project that deals with many array loops and conditions and shifting values between the indexes. This is one of the main pitfalls when working with classic ASP. Working with arrays turns half an hour job into a whole morning because with PHP, while it is quite messy it is packed full of routines and functions to handle arrays easily and effectively such as array_map and push.
One of the jobs is to create a function splitting a textbox form values into individual variables then inserted into database. Why? it is a long story. It feels more like reverse engineering rather than making something which was pratical. It is quite complex to sort and validate without PHP’s useful functions.
Some people are born to be designers, some are born to develop then you get the ones which can do both. I have found re-designing my profile site more tedious than building. The designers at work can design a website within minutes with photoshop but it can take me ages and yet I am never satified.
A website without a clean design can put off alot of clients and graphics design plays a big role in customer satifaction. You could have the most complex site in the world but witout the look it could fall flat. Though I don’t say this to every website but it is important when you want to present your work. CSS Zen is one of my many sites dedicated to making good looking websites at face value and many books on the web dedicated to creating nice looking websites.
Over the next few weeks I will be researching on good web design principles but not within the building process but getting the design right on paper before it goes in to production.
For the last few weeks I have been working with this client who sends out bulk emails to gain information for his clients. To be able to do this, i have been assigned to create email templates which when the user clicks leads to a form and logs information within a database.
My problem is that to create these emails is alot more complex than normal static web building. Testing with email clients within different browsers causes issues as every email client seems to display html templates differently. Outlook seems to be one of the worst cases for rendering templates. Outdated code, limited styling brings HTML emails back to the dark ages of website design.
Software for mass emailing such as “Mailing Manager” offer tools to help check rendering with email clients such as AOL and GMAIL and also help to reduce targeted words which could send your emails to the spam folder.
In my line of work it is important to keep up to date with the latest trend but it is also important to remember the old outdated information in case you require it.