web.erratica

Honestly, web designers are a geeky lot. If you strip away the creative process we give our left brains a pretty good workout. More often than not we’ll meet with a prospective client and try to sell ourselves using our knowledge of web standards and accessibility. “Your site will be built to be fully accessible and standards compliant” we’ll say and wait for the client to look as excited as we are. “Hmm, Where is the benefit to my business” they are surely thinking and “What the heck are standards and accessibility?”

Standards compliant markup means the designer has spent time developing a site using markup that will be read consistently across browsers and has stayed away from using proprietary tags or styles. This is simultaneously a line in the sand and a measure that ensures each person visiting your site will see the same content and receive the same message.

To understand why I say it is a line in the sand you need to understand a little bit of the history and rationale behind the web. Admittedly this is the probably the shortest and most dumbed down history of the Internet on the web but it should suffice.

The Internet began as the answer to the problem of sharing information over vast distances with people who would be viewing it on different computer operating systems. From the very beginning it was about sending the same message to everyone regardless of the differences between their computers. This was not an easy task but HTML was meant to standardize the display.

Initially the intent was to share scientific and scholarly information but it didn’t take long for the advertising and marketing industry to catch on to the vast potential of the Internet.

In fact it took about a nanosecond.

Marketing is essentially visual as almost all relationships start with attraction. The limits of basic html were quickly exceeded and the battle of the browsers began. Proprietary markup was introduced with each new version in the hopes that designers would design primarily for certain browsers thus gently forcing the public to adopt the “browser with the most toys”.

There are still remnants of those days. Occasionally you will stumble upon a site that says “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” but in general designers have realized that new features are best left to the standards developing bodies such as the W3C. Browser developers are expected to adhere to these standards more and more as it is clear to us that clients, designers and the public benefits.

The point is to get the same message to everyone regardless of their browser choice or their computer choice or their operating system. That always was the point.

Accessibility is essentially the same thing but it gives standards a helping hand. Even if you have done a fabulous job making your site standards compliant and every browser is rendering it the same way the individual you are trying to reach may have a hard time reading the type due to vision problems. An accessible site will allow type to be easily magnified. Try control+ or command+ depending on your browser to see this in action. Control or command- will reduce it again. An accessible site will label images and will ease the process of using a form for those who are viewing your site in a screen reader.

Building sites in this way is no longer considered an extra. It shows you are trying to reach out to all, not just some of your sites potential visitors.

And that should help your bottom line as well.

Maybe we need to answer the question “what is web design” as well.

When I first considered writing this post I knew that I’d immediately have to add that “of course this post is a client resource as those of us in ‘Web Design’ already know the answer“.

Of course that isn’t really true. The definition can be confusing . Even those of us who consider ourselves designers have trouble. Simply reading the job postings will demonstrate this. One company’s web designer is another company’s web developer. Whil one company is satisfied with layout and illustration skills another requires a solid grasp of coding, scripting and software development cycles. So venturing boldly into potentially controversial territory. I’ll make an attempt at defining, or at least narrowing down, what separates a web designer from “someone who makes web pages”. Then I’ll explore what a web designer should absolutely know and some additional (don’t you detest this term?) value added skills.

The first misconception I want to dismiss is that web design is about making a site “pretty”. Its not though it surely doesn’t hurt. The second misconception is that if a person understands Dreamweaver or even html and can use Photoshop or another graphics editing program they can call themselves a web designer.

That misconception is responsible for more built by a relative, designed by a friend and self-created sites well. . .you know. . .you’ve seen them. Frankly thats all some people need but I wouldn’t recommend that particular approach for any site that needs to attract an audience or upon which your business or reputation may depend. If your only knowledge of web design is using Dreamweaver in design view I think it safe to say at some point you will run into trouble and ask for help.

You wouldn’t expect your six year old child to create a gallery worthy painting with the paint set they received for Christmas either.

So web design is not merely graphic design or art. It is not html or software knowledge. What else is it not?

A surprising number of programmers and software engineers out on their own advertise as web designers.

Someone with any, or a combination, of the skills above has made a solid start - its simply that knowledge doesn’t stop there.

Web Design has a lot more in common with Industrial Design than it does with Graphic Design. Think about it. Remember that Buckminster Fuller quote from an earlier post?

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

What this quote means is that all of the skills mentioned above, in combination, come into play as well as a number of additional skills. The site should be beautiful. It should be functional. It should be easy to navigate.

Web projects are problems that need a solution. A good web designer will know how to separate the pertinent from the immaterial and will work out a solution that addresses those specifically. Unless your project is on an extremely fast track a wireframe diagram will be created at this point. This is much more about placement and how items are weighted on the page than look and feel. The point of a wireframe is to work out a layout that solves the unique design problems of a project.

A web designer needs to be able to grasp the nature of sometimes large amounts of content and understand how to make that information easy to find and navigate. Web designers are often the professional closet organizers of web content and this part is known as information architecture. This, as well as a number of skills and or knowledge areas to follow, is critical enough to the success of a web project that there may be a dedicated team member specializing in this one aspect of the whole if the project is very large.

More to come on this post. Return for more on usability, web standards, browser compatibility, color theory, creativity, css, seo . . .