-Tentus
Rant 19 - Talking to Web Designers
One of the most common problems in web development is miscommunication. There are lots of reasons why, from abscence of body language to simply not being serious enough, but the bulk of the problem stems from a lack of shared terminology and basic understanding of how the net works. In the following rant I'm going to try and lay down some basics that readers can follow in order to speak to web designers better- and webslingers, you should consider these points too, and think about how you deal with these issues.
The first thing that anyone needs to know is that the sky's the limit... but not everyone can make it to the top. In a nutshell, if it can be imagied then it can be done, but in general the more original, unique, and/or complex an idea is, the more likely it is that only a fraction of your audience will be able to properly see your idea. For example, there are all kinds of cool things you can do with flash and javascript, but lots of people have scripts disabled and flash support, while Adobe claims that it's next to universal, is not the same across all systems.
So, if we can't rely on flash and javascript to make sites cool, what can we use? Well, nothing beats an old-style table-based layout. The biggest drawback to these layouts is that you end up with screen size issues (though to be fair, relatively few flash programmers bother to circumvent the width issue either). So, if you're a client, the second big concept is that you're just going to have to DEAL with have blank space. We're sorry, but that's how the web works. Besides, countless illustrators have pointed out that empty space accents actual content.
Once we've gotten our head wrapped around the necessity of empty space, we start getting into questions of placement and size. Most clients tend to say stuff like "make it bigger" while also insisting that you "fit more onto the screen". They're also going to ask you to make things "pop". I can't tell you how much I hate these instuctions. Large text is good, but there are limits. Feeding into that, there's only so much that can be crammed into a single screen, especially when you have no idea how much screen the end user will have. What you need to understand from this is point out what you would like to have, but don't expect the impossible. Further, most web designers have their jobs because they're good at this stuff... trust their jugdement. If they say it looks junky, it probably does.
"Pop" gets a whole paragraph to itself. As I mentioned before, clients ask for this a lot. And honestly, when I hear it, I start thinking "how am I going to make this blend?" to my myself. What clients generally mean when they say "pop" is that they want an item to stand out- but it seems that a lot of clients have deciced that they know the best way to accomplish goal, and your graphic design sensibilities can stuff it. Or, a lot of clients ask for one thing to pop, then another, then another, and before long half tge front page is supposed to pop. Sigh. In general, I would advise simply telling your designer to "put emphasis" on one item per page, no more.
Part of the reason you should only have one emphasized element per page is due to color limitations. Let's face it folks, we have 16 millions variations to work with, but it all boils down to about six to nine colors that the layman notices (nine comes from the size colors, rgb + cmy, and then also black white and gray). Nine is a small number, good luck finding something distinct for multiple items that doesn't look like crap. Most websites should strive to have a small selection of colors in use, the simpler the better- clean and simple web designs last a lot better than really colorful designs. If you let your designer use a simple color scheme with one main contrasting color for emphasis, your "pop" will actually work better.
Speaking of letting your designer, you know, design... please don't keep changing your mind about what your want the design to look like in general. Unless you go ahead and tell your designer "This site is going to need a theme engine, because it's going to change a lot", pick a design and stick with it. Flip=flopping costs time and patience, and before long it's going to start costing you money. Web designers: I highly recommend making drafts that the client has to sign off on first, that way they don't even have the option of flipflopping unless they're willing to pay for the extra hours that it's going to take you. On the same note, clients, please don't cycle through details over and over. It's good to tweak a site a little, but I've had a number of clients who have tweaked their sites until they just look terrible.
With larger design questions like pop and whitespace out of the way, it's now important to inspect miscommunication over content. People, please don't ask web developers to write your content for you- most of us have a distaste for that sort of thing, which is why we chose to major in an art, not in lit. Most of the time you should write your content yourself in Word or something and then hand it over to your web designer to integrate... unless your designer has provided you with a UI to do this yourself (using TinyMCE or something). If you can do it yourself, do do it yourself, otherwise you're just pestering your designer and making yourself look stupid and dependant. Do some reading if you don't understand how to use a feature or make something work right... it's the internet, almost every UI in existence is extensively documented one way or the other.
So once you've got your content up, either by your own work or by the designer's, it's common to start noticing errors. STOP. DO NOT REACH FOR EMAIL CLIENT. Make a list first, and then start emailing. Most designers dislike debugging and rewording even more than they dislike writing in the first place. So what you, as the client, want to do is make a list with good details and then send that whole list over to the designer at once. But before you hit "send" make sure that the errors haven't been fixed since you spotted them, make sure that the errors are actually errors, and make sure that it's not just you- a lot of the bugs that I look into is just the client making a stupid mistake on their end, like saving an image in CMYK and then being surprised when their thumbnail in windows explorer doesn't look like the full-size image online.
The easiest thing to do at this point is tweak your verbage until the cows come home. Please, for the love of god, don't do that. I've already said to not tweak your site design too much, the same goes for content. Don't even let yourself do it, because eventually you're just going to ruin something that started off ok. Making things worse, a lot of editors are sloppy about tags, and changing back and back again simply piles up code until it's completely unreadable.
Ok, let's look at some bullets to summarize before I call it a day:
Ok, that's about it. I realize that this rant is pretty hard on clients, but the longer I work in this field the more amazed I am at what people walk in expecting, regardless of the reality of the situation.
-Tentus