Ask the Webmaster….

I am often invited to speak to one group or another of beginning web developers. I like to take their questions because it makes the conversation lively. Here are some typical questions that students ask:

How can a beginner jumpstart their coding learning besides tutorials?

The only way to get better at markup is to just do it and do it and do it. There is no substitute for hands-on because CSS can be finicky across browsers and you can only learn how to manage it by trial-and-error. I always tell my students that the learning is in the struggle – there is no book you can read or tutorial you can try that can replace the struggle of putting an actual site together and launching it. There are several practical ways you can find websites to work on:

1. There are a great many non-profits that would love to have you work on their site. They won’t be able to pay you but then, you don’t know much (and are therefore not worth much in the marketplace…) so what you will gain instead of a paycheck is experience and lots of it. Don’t just offer to build a new site then abandon the client. Stay with them over several semesters so you can have the experience of doing maintenance which is generally the better part of the work in this industry. I launched maybe a 12-18 new sites per year in my business but I maintained over 400 – maintenance was without a doubt the bulk of our work and it will be the bulk of your work too. Maintaining sites others have built is also a great experience for you because there is nothing like dealing with someone else’s awful code to show you how NOT to do something!

2. Build a website for yourself! At CCI, we require our IT undergrads to build an Interactive Resume which is a website built by the student, for the student and about the student. This is a great project for all IT students but most especially for those interested in pursuing a career in web development. Your website should showcase your talents, serve as a portfolio of your work and give your clients or employer a good feel for the very best work you are capable of producing

3. Do a CSS Zen Garden project. You will learn a lot from the struggle and have something fun to add to your portfolio.

Do you validate your sites?

This website is not totally standards-compliant because I am using WordPress on Thesis and there are a few lingering issues to work out in the code base to achieve full compliance. However, best practice is to validate sites as XHTML-strict using the W3C Validator. Make sure you are declaring the correct Doctype. Check for accessibility issues using the WebAIM validator.

Do you feel as though Web designers have to be artistically inclined or creative in order to be successful?

Absolutely not. The only job that requires artistic ability in this industry is graphic designer. The better part of the work is not the visual piece of the website but the markup and programming behind it. It has been my experience that most visual designers are not very good at markup and vice versa. Generally speaking, unless you are a one-person shop, there is an artist on staff who does the visual piece and programmers and coders who do the rest. I was the butt of a great many jokes in my shop because of my absolute ineptitude with Photoshop. What I know about it could fit in thimble with room left over. This did not stop me from being successful. One of the secrets to success is to recognize where your skills are lacking and hire around that. I always had a professional graphics person either on staff or on stand-by to take care of the visual elements. Our shop did all the programming, markup and hosting and there was plenty of work for everyone, including the artistically challenged!

As a developer, what kind of input do you have regarding content? Should we try to focus primarily on structure as we develop our websites?

Content will be the bane of your existence.The clients never have it – no matter how much they promise – and unless you have subject matter expertise in their industry and business, you won’t be able to write it for them.

I have several ways to tackle this problem. I always ask the client if they have collateral materials when I do the first interview – brochures, flyers, even grant proposals can contain the seeds of the website content. It gives you somewhere to start. If they do have it, I try to get electronic copies but this is not always possible. (TIP: If they had the materials printed locally, call the printer – they have it electronically even if the client does not.) Sometimes, you leave the client with a handful of paper and you end up typing the stuff up. I always charged a content management fee for this sort of work. Sometimes you can get a read on printed materials with OCR but this is not always reliable and you should proof any OCR’d content carefully. If they don’t have collateral materials, bang out the information architecture with them then go into nag-mode. This does not mean send one email every three or four weeks saying you are still waiting on the content. The client simply ignores you until a board meeting is three days away, then they bombard you with every kind of content placement request you can imagine. The only way to head off this annoying turn of events is to hound them constantly for the content they owe you.

In my business, I kept a “nag list” and I posted everyone who owed me content an minimum of once per week to ask for it. If a few weeks went by and no response, I started calling them at least once a week in addition to the constant barrage of email requests. It did not always produce content (and often they got annoyed and asked me to stop nagging but I would always get that in writing first..) but what it did do is put the ball back in the client’s court. When they called in a panic because the board meeting was coming up and there was nothing on the website, I would gently remind them of how many times I tried to get the content from them. By constantly getting on their front burner with your content requests, it makes it a lot easier to drop a steep bill on them when they suddenly want you to place fifty pages of content by tomorrow.

I always added a “Rush Fee” to any job that caused me to break my shop’s work schedule – I would accommodates their request but it would cost them a lot of money. At the end of the day, this is often the only way they learn not to drag their feet but some number of them will still do it and just pay the extra fee for the privilege. I learned this self-protective policy very early in the game because their slackness often ended up costing my company money. In the beginning, I would take half of the money up front and half when the site was completed. Because it is so hard to get content out of the client, I would often have a gap of many months between the first payment and the last – yet my expenses continued at a regular pace. I had to implement a policy that did not rely on content provision for payment. My new policy was half upfront and half within thirty days or when the site was complete, whichever came first. This also would not stop them from dragging their feet but it did ensure I could meet my payroll every week while I nagged them. I found that you have to be aggressive and persistent about content because it is the hardest part of the whole process.

What’s your opinion of developing in Flash?

Flash is a widely abused tool and in my opinion, is not for building websites. There is a reason the SKIP INTRO button exists and it is because most users are totally annoyed by Flash. I cannot understand a client who spends thousands of dollars (or a developer who spend tens or hundreds of hours…) on a Flash design, only to have to add a SKIP button because no one wants to look at it. People forget that the web is not art. It is an information medium. Anything that interferes with the ability to consume the wanted information annoys the user, who only wants to get what they came for as quickly as possible. Flash intro pages are annoying but so are constantly moving Flash headers. Unless the site is strictly for entertainment and the Flash content IS the content, blinky flash headers interfere with the users ability to concentrate on reading and are almost universally hated. I never used Flash in my business unless the client absolutely insisted. Flash can theoretically be made usable but most designers do not take the extra time to do this, making Flash content unfriendly to everyone, including users with disabilities.

Do clients seem more interested in style at the expense of accessibility or vice versa?

I was talking about accessibility back in 2002 and no one was interested. I had materials on my website and in my collaterals about Section 508 and why people should care but no one did. I pulled the materials out of my sales presentation in 2004 and did not put them back until last year, when suddenly I started getting requests to make sites 508-compliant, mostly from government clients. Clients care far more about style than usability and I have only started to see a change in that position in the last few years. Corporate and government clients are getting a lot more interested in the issue because lawsuits are being filed and won which forces them to get interested. One of the ways to help clients see the value in making a site accessible is to explain to them that much of the same work that makes the site accessible also optimizes it for search engines. Clients are a lot more willing to pay to improve their placement on Google than to make their website accessible – I always found that showing them how THEY benefit from accessibility can help push them into doing it, though many just will not give up style for usability. At the end of the day, it is the client’s website and if they don’t want to pay for the work, you don’t do the work but that should not stop you from trying to educate. They may come around if you explain its importance often enough.

When working with a client who doesn’t know what they want, how do you start to guide them into telling you what you need to make the website?

First, solve the look/feel problem. I do this by asking them to show me three or so websites they like and to tell me a little something about why they like each one. This can be very revealing – often not because of what they tell you but what they don’t tell you. For example, if the client shows you three blinky, annoying Flash sites, you know right away that you need to do some education with the client about why that it is a bad idea to build websites with lots of motion. They probably think the sites are really cool and you have to be gentle and kind as you try to peel them off that idea. Many times when you look at two or three sites together, you realize that what they are actually responding to is a color or a font style – for example, you may notice that all of the sites the client shows you are blue. They may talk about the pictures or the content or the navigation but if you are astute and recognize the similarities in color between the sites, you will realize something about the design you need to create for them – it should be blue.

Once you have some idea how the site should look, you can begin to work out the architecture. All websites have certain common elements – Home, About, Contact at minimum. I would always launch content-deficient clients with this minimum content then build it out as we went – the most important thing is to get them out there. Rome was not built in a day. I do not recommend waiting until you have every bit of content to go live or 90% of your websites will never see the light of day. Beyond the basic information there will likely be business and industry-specific information that should be on the website. Trade magazines and websites can be useful sources of information as can the non-technical people who work in the business. The best way to understand what content needs to be on the website is to study the business. Talk to more than one person about what the organization does and how they do it. If they have a facility nearby, visit it and talk to everyone you can. Look at competitor’s websites – often this will be your number one source of ideas about what content is needed. The most important thing is to get yourself into your client’s customer’s shoes – what does you client’s customer need to know about the organization in order to persuade them to take the desired action? There is a good bit of marketing and psychology that goes into that analysis and if you have not taken a course in each topic, you may want to consider it as it will be helpful to you in understanding your client and more importantly, you client’s customer.

Where on the webpage is the best place to put navigation bars – left, right, top, and/or bottom?

As a general rule, the main navigation belongs on the left, in plain text that can be read by search engines, not in images. Top navigation has limited usefulness because at some point you hit that left-to-right size limitation beyond which you must wrap additional navigation to a second line. The navigation on this site will hit that wall at some point, then I will move it to the left because I have never seen a really good way to do multiple lines of navigation at the top – it is generally unworkable and ugly. The top can be used for a small cluster of frequently-accessed links – for example – Home, Contact, FAQ or a login box all work at the top – but your primary navigation should run down the left side of the page. There are several reasons for this. First and most importantly, users are trained by lots of other websites as well as many desktop applications to look for navigation on the left. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of sticking with what the user knows. Creative navigation, which we call “Mystery Meat Navigation” in the business, annoys the user and causes them to leave. This is the opposite of the behavior we want. The only person who likes arty navigation is the person who created it – everyone else wishes they just put a list of links down the left so they could find what they are looking for. Remember – the web is NOT art, it is an information medium. People do not want to puzzle out what the icon that looks like a coffee cup means!

Another reason that primary navigation works best on the left is that Westerners read left to right, so right-hand navigation feels unnatural to them. Right-hand navigtion is workable for a secondary set of links but I have found that people in our culture do not naturally look to the right for the index – they look to the left, so that is where you should place it. The bottom is an awful place for primary navigation. Links for Support, Privacy Policy, Return Policies and other additional information people may want after they have consumed the main content can go here but main navigation needs to stay on the left.