Work with designers

nipster

I just finished a site for a young biotech company. www.neuromedtech.com

They had hired a design company to do the site and me to "program it" Has anyone else had any experience dealing with a design company.

They gave me the entire site in an Adobe Illustrator EPS file, that I had to slice in to gif's and jpgs.

And they tend to talk in pt's and inches as appose to pixels, this just seems odd to me.

Let me know what you think of the site too, for paying big bucks it seems really plain.

Mordecai

Try to stay away from pixels as much as possible--due to padding, margin, border, etc. differences between browsers, it's hard to get the same look.
I have worked with a design team before, and they gave me the images and made me put it together.
Frankly, I don't think that page was worth paying much for. And is the "skip intro" supposed to not do anything?

nipster

Thanks for the reply Mordecai, the intro is really short so it really only does something in the first 10 seconds, then fades to a "Play Again" and then it plays a different "intro". That is how they wanted it not my idea.

I just dont understand why you would use a vector drawing program to make a website, when all the jpeg and gifs are bitmap. Also they wanted their special font used so a lot of the menu is in gifs which to me is just retarded.

vaaaska

I am primarily a print designer - going back to when I was a kid.

I just dont understand why you would use a vector drawing program to make a website, when all the jpeg and gifs are bitmap. Also they wanted their special font used so a lot of the menu is in gifs which to me is just retarded.

Try designing a website as opposed to assigning backgrounds and text color attributes. One of the biggest things lacking on the web today is typography - and where unique fonts are used it's all good. I can mock up 20 websites in Illustrator/Freehand in the time it would take to mock something up with html/graphics/CSS/etc. Maybe that font is a commonly used company font or perhaps it's used so people can not text zoom and mess the layout (which seems like an obvious concern to me).

I just finished a site for a young biotech company. www.neuromedtech.com

Yep, that's an uninspired website. But how many uninspired websites exist? Billions. If the client is satisfied and the message gets out there - who really cares?. I found the information easy to get to on this site, even if I think the site is ugly.

Not all designers are the same. Don't feel obligated to group us all together. Some of us actually do know how to program a website and some of us even know how to build a backend to drive the whole darn thing too.

I have worked with more than a few code people who were completely moronic and lacking in understand about visual design. It's a process very similar to developing code, however, the tools can be different. There is a common language between the two if there is some respect, patience and understanding.

??? This is new. Did you want a second header to be in the code at the bottom of the pages?

<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
</HEAD>

bubblenut

/bubble shaking with fear
Quick, hide before the standards vigilantes arrive, they'll rip you limb from limb!!

I doubt you want to completely redesign to remove the nested table layout, but there are a few easy things you can do to make it a little more standards compliant

Add a xhtml transitional DTD
Lowercase all tag names eg. <html> [line:1 (and 2 for some reason)]
Quote all attribute values eg. <td align="left" valign="top"> [line:12]
Close all tags (including "empty" ones) eg. [line:80]

HTH
Bubble

[edit]
Can't ... make ... head ... spell!!
[/edit]

vaaaska

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhck!!!!!!!

Div...div...div...div...hack...IE...s/ucks...mu/chos...

🙂

AstroTeg

I've worked with several designers. They've had varying levels of knowledge on how the backend works. Haven't had any problems so far.

As for mocking stuff up, I'm a fan of doing it in something else besided HTML. It forces me to not think about tagging and about design (although I'm not a design guy, I'll fiddle with the designs of my personal sites). Then its a fun challenge taking the design and matching it as closely to what I came up with.

The designers I've worked with are usually pretty good about chopping the images up for me. Sometimes they'll even give me the html code. I highly value their input and work they do. I have them check the site every step of the way to make sure its being developed to their design spec (which is the spec the customer wants). Happy designer means happy client...

nipster

there are a few easy things you can do to make it a little more standards compliant

Yes i know that it is not complaint Image ready likes to use uppercase tags for some reason. Not something im too worried about right now, but my next site will be strict xhtml.

This is new. Did you want a second header to be in the code at the bottom of the pages?

I was playing around with not caching the page, I had read for some browsers that would help, but not sure if its necessary, I will remove it.