11 Complete Miss

The article completely misses the reason why web professionals suffer a lack of respect. It’s not that web sites can be done by robots. The real problem is that anyone can crank out a web site. Almost everyone knows someone whose little brother “does” web sites. A former client of mine actually sent me links to sites done by elementary school students as proof. Inevitably, when I tell someone I’m a web developer, they tell me about the site they did, either in Front Page, Go Live or some similar tool. Clients know this and wonder how we professional developers justify charging so much. And their eyes just seem to glaze over when you start talking about a complete web strategy involving findability, usability, accessability and maintainability. All they want is a few pretty pics on their site.

posted at 09:05 pm on June 12, 2007 by Dean Collins

12 Untitled

I consistently battle the “well it shouldn’t be that hard, all you have to do is X, Y, Z right?…â€? from higher-ups who believe everything happens automagically as long as you have a “web program.â€? It can be challenging and, quite frankly, pretty disheartening and demoralizing.

They think it’s a magic formula, and they already have all the variables to solve the equation. I have come across a few clients who have think similarly to Windy’s higher-ups: “Well I know how to use [insert graphics manipulation software here], so I’m a designer too.”

This attitude becomes apparent when expressed in their questions. The belligerent “I already built it for you, why can’t you take [my design] and put it on the web?” At this point I begin to wonder why it crossed their minds to hire a professional, when they are so sure they can succeed at it themselves?

While I make an effort to explain the intricacies of web design, I often feel my professionalism slipping. I am so tempted to say in agreement, “It appears you really do not need my professional services. Please feel free to contact me again in the future if you have any questions.”

posted at 09:06 pm on June 12, 2007 by Thuy Nguyen

14 Advice for Web Site Consumers

There are about a zillion web sites telling people how to make web sites. This one is about the best. But, I’ve been unable to find one that gives advice to someone who wants to hire a web design firm or individual. It’s useless for Molly and others to promote professionalism if there’s no way for the consumer to judge if a firm or indvidual practices it.

I’m not sure what to do about this problem. Perhaps the W3C could make a web site describing what to look for and then advertising it to potential clients.

The way things are now, the only people capable of judging a web designers competence are those capable of doing the job themselves.

posted at 08:11 pm on June 13, 2007 by Stanley Furlong

15 Are humans' mind Turing machines?

Very interesting article, I’m a web designer but I had the chance to study AI and computability with some great researchers when I was in Liège (in Belgium, you see? The country as large as a WC where three language communities battle each other to sit on the toilet! Ok… now I… I live in Luxembourg… waiting for France to conquer the whole territory ;)

This is a field I really was passionate about, being creative is all about feeling emotions and triggering actions based on these. You may choose to use the color red somewhere in your comps because you automatically associate a tremendous lot of things to this color, things that occur both in conscious and unconscious layers in your mind — I too just love it when my wife puts on her red underwear, for a computer red is nothing but #ff0000. Knowledge representation always existed in AI, but consciousness is a lot more difficult to grasp.

I recommend “Gödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, a metaphorical exploration of humans’ mind with Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness as a focal point. It has been my favorite book for years, and the emotional feeling that triggered my career.

Just my 2 cents, bravo for this article!

posted at 01:33 pm on June 14, 2007 by Régis Kuckaertz

16

The way things are now, the only people capable of judging a web designers competence are those capable of doing the job themselves.

That’s really true. My husband is in charge of hiring a design firm for a project his company is working on, and he came home and asked me to make him a list of questions to ask the designers. I did that, but then I asked him, “Now that you have the questions, how are you going to know how to evaluate the answers?”

Hubby’s got a pretty good BS detector, but he doesn’t know accessibility from a hole in the ground. Even with the right questions he lacked the tools to make a sound evaluation.

What I ended up doing was having a real conversation with him about what I do and why the work I do is important, and explaining to him what a good designer can bring to his company. From there, he was able to formulate his own questions, whose answers he was fit to judge.

posted at 04:12 pm on June 14, 2007 by amber simmons

17 Brain vs. Mind

I really enjoyed this article because it touched on something we all must feel at some point or another – Do I matter? Does my design matter?

The answer is a bit more philosophy than xhtml/css. This won’t surprise those of us who believe we are ourselves designed and are meant to actually design things.

I feel great when I design. I feel part of a greater purpose. I constantly want to better myself (like reading ALA articles from other great minds) to contribute to a better design the next time around.

The brain is a wonderful piece of meat, but a piece of meat nonetheless, made of molecules, atoms, particles – much like a mouse pad. Human persons are more than mere physical brains cranking out 0s and 1s and responding to external physical stimuli.

The non-physical human soul is what makes us who we are. It is with our mind, which is a capacity of our human soul, that we evaluate whether a design is excellent. The brain, much less the computer, assists in that task but is not and will never be capable of doing so on its own.

It is with our will, another capacity of the soul, that we take action and review our design. We delete something because we think it might offend someone, or we rearrange certain elements to make the site more user friendly for the near blind maybe because we’re compassionate about other people. We have a will, sensations, feelings, a sense of what is right and wrong. Machines don’t. Never will. We are unique.

So our jobs as designers are secured. Maybe and temporarily not where it is not appreciated, but in the overall framework it is. What greater good we do with those awe-inspiring skills is a bigger question.

posted at 12:44 am on June 15, 2007 by Franck Barfety

18 History of Programming

Jonathan,
You’ve written a very interesting brief history of programming in your introductory statements here, but you kept using the term “Web design” when you meant “Programming”, and the term “website” when you meant “program”… Here, I’ve fixed it up:

Programming (web design) is still a young discipline, and it’s generally poorly understood. As computers (the web) becomes mainstream, an increasing number of people and organizations want programs (websites)—and so more people are involved in commissioning, managing, and designing them. It’s not surprising that many of these people aren’t familiar with how programming (web design) works. Clients, managers, and colleagues often assume that programming (web design) is a subset of some other discipline, like…

…like engineering.

Many programmers, me among them, and many actual engineers put little stock in the misnomer of “software engineering”; the “real” engineering disciplines recognize there is nowhere near the rigor or body of hard knowledge and experience in programming that there is in any of the true engineering fields.

What you’ve described here is eerily familiar. I believe almost everything you say here about web design as a field—the ignorance and subsequent lack of respect by uninformed decision-makers, the mistaken belief that it’s a subset of another field, the value of individual judgement—can be said about programming. An essential element of a programmer’s job is generalization.

Programming is also a young discipline. People (i.e. managers) want to treat it like a construction project; scheduling with Gantt charts, throwing more resources at it, without understanding the completely different nature of what’s involved. Construction, and the related design and engineering involved, is at least 10 thousand years in the making. We’ve been programming for around 50 years, and Web Design has been around for only the last part of that.

Programming and Web Design are more … intangible … and may (or may not) always be more of an art/craft than a science. It’s still early.

I, as a programmer working with web related technology, would appreciate the unique talents brought to the table by a true Web Designer, even though I’ve done much work with program UI design and usability — it’s not the same.

posted at 03:59 am on June 15, 2007 by Stephen Paulsen

19 Untitled

I think web design covers three disciplines. Information, Design and Programming. I’ve yet to meet a person who is sufficiently good at all of these to be able to work in anyone of these fields in their own right. And that is the problem with web design. Most websites are created by someone who is “professional” in only one of these fields. They then deliver a substandard product and a lower price than if you hired three professionals.

In fact I would say the problem is the term “web design” itself. Personally I’ve always thought of a web designer to only be the “Design” part of the three disciplines above. Web programming would be another and Information Architect would be the third. The industry has to stop lumping all these three disciplines into one Job Description.

posted at 08:49 am on June 17, 2007 by Robin Massart

20 typewriter = hemingway?

I agree wholeheartedly that “design” is much more than just painting something with a coat of “pretty”, and web design is much more than banging out some html. As I like to characterize it, “knowing how to use Photoshop” doesn’t make you a graphic designer, and “knowing html” doesn’t make you a web designer – just like knowing how to use a typewriter doesn’t make you a novelist.

posted at 02:24 am on June 20, 2007 by jay mcdonald