The Web Design & Development Megathread

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nexus6: Sep 2, 2011; If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes

The Merkinman posted:

3 weeks? but I already promised everyone it'd be done in a few days!

As long as we're talking about 'the real world', I constantly have a struggle with Creative (mostly) about reinventing the wheel. Like we built a component that does A, B and C given X, Y and Z, but then they want it to do F and J but only sometimes, oh and retroactively work with all the others and never break in the future. Or basically like "yeah I know we have element in the Style Guide, but my page is special", and/or "I don't get to be creative ".
What do you do in those situations?

I don't have an answer for you, but I know your exact situation. At my last job none of the 'creatives' responsible for designing projects had any experience in digital work, only print, and always complained about petty things like "why does this line break on this word on my 30" desktop but on a different word on my 12" laptop? :qq:

Except the 'Creative Director' who, despite working for a digital agency for a decade, still produced designs that could not be accomplished in a webpage/HTML email.

Hell, I remember one time he wanted this site to have an autoplaying video background and, when I asked him to send me the video file, gave me a 1.3GB 1920x1080 mp4

# ? May 24, 2018 12:58

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# ? May 16, 2024 11:13

Lumpy: Apr 26, 2002; La! La! La! Laaaa!; College Slice

nexus6 posted:

I don't have an answer for you, but I know your exact situation. At my last job none of the 'creatives' responsible for designing projects had any experience in digital work, only print, and always complained about petty things like "why does this line break on this word on my 30" desktop but on a different word on my 12" laptop?

Except the 'Creative Director' who, despite working for a digital agency for a decade, still produced designs that could not be accomplished in a webpage/HTML email.

Hell, I remember one time he wanted this site to have an autoplaying video background and, when I asked him to send me the video file, gave me a 1.3GB 1920x1080 mp4

When I used to get impossible to make HTML emails, I would just screen shot it, make the email a single IMG and put all the text in the alt tag. When noby complained, I started doing it for the non impossible ones.

I don�t miss agency work.

# ? May 24, 2018 14:14

nexus6: Sep 2, 2011; If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes

Excluding the gender politics, the sentiment in this article is pretty much how I'm feeling about agency work right now:

https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/i-just-dont-want-to-be-a-software-developer-anymore-a371422069a1

Building my own personal blog and side project in my own time was fun, and I can see why you'd put in a more stringent development methodology for larger projects/teams, but I don't get to do anything like this at my job.

Over the past 6 months all I've had to do mainly are small parts in projects I never helped build, in technologies I've not yet had time to learn properly.

I'm finding it hard to stay motivated when the rare task I get that I enjoy doing gets pushed out they way by urgent tasks I don't feel qualified enough to do :smith:

What's really getting me down right now is that this seems to be the case for any agency work .

# ? May 24, 2018 17:02

melon cat: Jan 21, 2010; Nap Ghost

prom candy posted:

Why not just sell them a monthly maintenance package and do the updates for them? If they're not savvy you may end up doing the same amount or more work in support.

That's actually a great suggestion- I'll do that. Just out of curiosity- what's a fair market rate for a monthly maintenance package (updating plugins, loading speed enhancements, making sure it doesn't completely loving break when WP is updated, etc.)?

melon cat fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Mar 16, 2019

# ? May 24, 2018 19:36

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

The low end of WordPress "development" absolutely encourages that kind of nonsense and it's garbage. I love WP but it's an incredibly easy platform to abuse. Seeing people pay someone thousands of dollars to set them up with a premade theme and a bunch of random plugins is nauseating.

I hope Squarespace and Wix and the like keep getting better and cutting market share away from junky WP resellers. I usually tell people who want to pay me to build them a gallery site for their photos or art or whatever to just go with Squarespace, it will be much cheaper and easier for them to work with.

# ? May 24, 2018 23:15

kedo: Nov 27, 2007

melon cat posted:

That's actually a great suggestion- I'll do that. Just out of curiosity- what's a fair market rate for a monthly maintenance package (updating plugins, loading speed enhancements, making sure it doesn't completely loving break when WP is updated, etc.)?

Just take your hourly rate, estimate the maximum hours you'd need per month, and then do a retainer for that number of hours at your rate or maaaaybe a little less if it's for an extended period of time.

On the other hand entirely, unless you're really hard up for work I wouldn't recommend maintenance. You'll eventually start filling a webmaster role and it will suck. The whole point of WP is that the client should be able to update their own content, and maybe once in a blue moon need your help to perform an update.

# ? May 25, 2018 11:27

Tei: Feb 19, 2011

my bony fealty posted:

The low end of WordPress "development" absolutely encourages that kind of nonsense and it's garbage. I love WP but it's an incredibly easy platform to abuse. Seeing people pay someone thousands of dollars to set them up with a premade theme and a bunch of random plugins is nauseating.

Fun facts: despite creating a CMS system with a editor, so users can introduce text themselves, many opt to ask the original website creators to enter new content in the site.

Is like... people pay for more than a website, they pay for a service and having a provider-customer relation. Also people is lazy.

Tei fucked around with this message at 12:12 on May 25, 2018

# ? May 25, 2018 12:05

kedo: Nov 27, 2007

Ugh, that describes most of my WP clients and it drives me insane. When I'm having a scoping call with a potential client I have this whole spiel I go through about the pros and cons of a CMS and why they may not need one, no really, they really probably don't need one, please listen to me! And of course they always say, "No, no, no, unlike those other clients we really need one! We're going to post 100 blog posts per day! Seriously!"

And then 90% of the time they fall into one of two categories ��they never touch the site again after launch, or they come back to me every couple of weeks with a new blog post they want to make with some excuse as to why they can't make it themselves.

# ? May 26, 2018 11:30

CarForumPoster: Jun 26, 2013; â¡POWERâ¡

Why have another domain to store images/content? Like SiteX.com loads its images, videos, etc. from SiteXcdn.com or something like that.

# ? May 26, 2018 13:39

Doh004: Apr 22, 2007; Mmmmm Donuts...

CDNs have a whole bunch of use cases, but primarily it's better equipped to serve static content to users (images, videos, css, js) that don't change frequently. CDN networks will generally have "edges" (servers) across the world that'll be used based off of where the user is requesting the information. The closer the edge, the faster it'll get to them.

# ? May 26, 2018 14:19

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

CarForumPoster posted:

Why have another domain to store images/content? Like SiteX.com loads its images, videos, etc. from SiteXcdn.com or something like that.

If you're running a complicated website, your application servers are kind of expensive, with lots of cpu and memory and stuff. Static content like images and videos doesn't need any of that - it's just pulling bytes off a disk and shoving them down the pipe. So it's often a good idea to farm that work off to a bunch of cheaper servers that exist just to service those requests for static content.

You could do this in your load balancer, where you direct requests for static content to a separate set of servers. But then your load balancer still has to handle all that traffic, which can be pretty substantial. By serving your static content from a different domain, you can use DNS to have users connect directly to your static content servers to get that static content, taking that traffic away from your application server stack entirely. You can even farm it out to a CDN that focuses entirely on serving that sort of content at minimal cost, has replicas close to where the user is to minimize latency, etc.

# ? May 26, 2018 14:21

CarForumPoster: Jun 26, 2013; â¡POWERâ¡

Jabor posted:

If you're running a complicated website, your application servers are kind of expensive, with lots of cpu and memory and stuff. Static content like images and videos doesn't need any of that - it's just pulling bytes off a disk and shoving them down the pipe. So it's often a good idea to farm that work off to a bunch of cheaper servers that exist just to service those requests for static content.

You could do this in your load balancer, where you direct requests for static content to a separate set of servers. But then your load balancer still has to handle all that traffic, which can be pretty substantial. By serving your static content from a different domain, you can use DNS to have users connect directly to your static content servers to get that static content, taking that traffic away from your application server stack entirely. You can even farm it out to a CDN that focuses entirely on serving that sort of content at minimal cost, has replicas close to where the user is to minimize latency, etc.

Where can I read more about how to set this up?

# ? May 26, 2018 14:43

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

kedo posted:

Just take your hourly rate, estimate the maximum hours you'd need per month, and then do a retainer for that number of hours at your rate or maaaaybe a little less if it's for an extended period of time.

On the other hand entirely, unless you're really hard up for work I wouldn't recommend maintenance. You'll eventually start filling a webmaster role and it will suck. The whole point of WP is that the client should be able to update their own content, and maybe once in a blue moon need your help to perform an update.

Try to figure out what it's worth to them and charge that. I disagree with your second point. Having recurring revenue is the only real way you can scale yourself as a freelancer. It's also a good way to maintain contact with your clients and make sure their sites don't atrophy. If you keep them happy they'll refer you new business, and you can potentially sell them expanded services down the road.

The hustle of constantly finding new clients, delivering one project for them, and then moving on the next one is pretty unsustainable if you're trying to build a business. It'll also kill you when their sites start having issues in 2-3 years and they need help and want it for free. It does work well if you're just doing side work to make some extra cash though.

# ? May 26, 2018 16:19

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

CarForumPoster posted:

Why have another domain to store images/content? Like SiteX.com loads its images, videos, etc. from SiteXcdn.com or something like that.

For some of my projects I like to use WordPress for storing and managing content but I do not want to use WP for the front-end. So I have a WP installation that acts only as a backend, and I can feed data from it to wherever I want. It works well with clients who feel comfortable with WP, it doesn't matter to them what the front end is in.

Decoupled back and front ends are good, hopefully other CMSs will take a cue from WP and expose an API.

# ? May 26, 2018 18:42

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

Headless Wordpress is awesome, if I was doing sites right now I'd probably be all about Wordpress+Gatsby.

# ? May 26, 2018 21:55

kedo: Nov 27, 2007

prom candy posted:

Try to figure out what it's worth to them and charge that. I disagree with your second point. Having recurring revenue is the only real way you can scale yourself as a freelancer. It's also a good way to maintain contact with your clients and make sure their sites don't atrophy. If you keep them happy they'll refer you new business, and you can potentially sell them expanded services down the road.

I think we can agree to disagree on this as different practices work for different people. I freelance, only do maintenance when I really have to, and quite literally 100% of my business is repeat customers and referrals. I have zero recurring revenue and my cash flow has been great for four years running.

On the other hand, I have a friend who codes maybe two or three sites per year max and he makes all his money with reseller hosting and maintenance. He probably does at least as much business as I do. However that's simply not the type of work I'm interested in. That's not to say it's not one way to do it, it's just not a way that I like.

prom candy posted:

It'll also kill you when their sites start having issues in 2-3 years and they need help and want it for free.

Eh, not really? Clients wanting work for free is the mark of a bad client, and if someone asks me to work for free I simply do not work with them any longer, period. I don't care what arguments they make, or what it does to my reputation. It has yet to bite me in the rear end. In fact, to toot my own horn a bit I'd say that firing clients like this is on the whole an excellent business tactic because lovely clients refer more lovely clients. By choosing not to work with them, I avoid working with a bunch of jerks in the future.

On the other hand, if a client comes back to me 2-3 years after a site launch with an issue and I realize I made a mistake, I absolutely fix it for free because I probably shouldn't have made the mistake in the first place.

# ? May 27, 2018 00:34

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

How do you handle stuff like keeping Wordpress secure? Just pay-as-you-go maintenance tasks?

# ? May 27, 2018 02:40

kedo: Nov 27, 2007

Warn and inform the client. If they want my help with updates I�ll help, but taking on responsibility for the security of a CMS that Is notoriously not secure is a liability concern imo.

# ? May 27, 2018 22:53

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

I'm running into an annoying issue with Semantic UI React. I'm using their Search component and set this:

code:

<Search
                    loading={this.searchIsLoading}
                    minCharacters={2}
                    noResultsMessage={"No results found."}
                    onSearchChange={this.handleSearch}
                    results={this.props.referentialPigmentStore!.referentialPigmentResults!.map(x => {
                        return {
                            id: x.id,
                            title: x.name,
                            description: "(" + x.referential.name + ")"
                        };
                    })}
                >

But "onSearchChange" fires regardless of the amount of characters. From my understanding of the documentation the "minCharacters" property is supposed to set that, no? What am I missing?

# ? May 31, 2018 14:24

Lumpy: Apr 26, 2002; La! La! La! Laaaa!; College Slice

Furism posted:

I'm running into an annoying issue with Semantic UI React. I'm using their Search component and set this:
code:
<Search
                    loading={this.searchIsLoading}
                    minCharacters={2}
                    noResultsMessage={"No results found."}
                    onSearchChange={this.handleSearch}
                    results={this.props.referentialPigmentStore!.referentialPigmentResults!.map(x => {
                        return {
                            id: x.id,
                            title: x.name,
                            description: "(" + x.referential.name + ")"
                        };
                    })}
                >
But "onSearchChange" fires regardless of the amount of characters. From my understanding of the documentation the "minCharacters" property is supposed to set that, no? What am I missing?

I think their docs are badly worded.... it's the number of characters to hit before you *display* results. You can see it loading data in the example if you set the minCharacters. You can always have your onSearchChange not do anything if there are less than n characters.

# ? May 31, 2018 16:45

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

Lumpy posted:

I think their docs are badly worded.... it's the number of characters to hit before you *display* results. You can see it loading data in the example if you set the minCharacters. You can always have your onSearchChange not do anything if there are less than n characters.

Ooh I see! I think they could probably word it better yes.

Indeed my workaround so far was to not fire off my XHR until the data.value was >= 2 and that worked fine. Thanks for the clarification!

# ? May 31, 2018 22:15

nexus6: Sep 2, 2011; If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes

Following my rant/disillusionment with agency work I had an informal interview with a company looking for developers for product work. The founder had previously come from the agency world and had enough of it and even one of the leads interviewing me had left agency work 4 years ago and not looked back.

Here's hoping for some positive feedback because I took this job thinking I'd be working on big projects but I'm pretty much working helpdesk on other people's projects :smith:

# ? Jun 4, 2018 11:39

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Stupid CSS question: Is there a way to set styling on "if this element, or any of its subelements, have/lose focus", analogous to the way :hover works? My boss is insisting that we make the UI react the same to tab-navigation as to mousing around, and that's the problem. At present I'm considering A) Explaining to him that this isn't entirely viable, or B) Using jQuery or something to toggle a class for "this-element-has-focus". I suspect B is the better answer, but want to confirm.

# ? Jun 5, 2018 00:18

The Fool: Oct 16, 2003

darthbob88 posted:

Stupid CSS question: Is there a way to set styling on "if this element, or any of its subelements, have/lose focus", analogous to the way :hover works? My boss is insisting that we make the UI react the same to tab-navigation as to mousing around, and that's the problem. At present I'm considering A) Explaining to him that this isn't entirely viable, or B) Using jQuery or something to toggle a class for "this-element-has-focus". I suspect B is the better answer, but want to confirm.

Use tabindex.

See "mouse specific events" here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Accessibility/CSS_and_JavaScript

and here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Accessibility/HTML#Building_keyboard_accessibility_back_in

# ? Jun 5, 2018 00:26

Lonely Wolf: Jan 20, 2003; Will hawk false idols for heaps and heaps of dough.

There's https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-focus-within which has acceptable deployment. There's also a polyfill in resources.

# ? Jun 5, 2018 00:31

spacebard: Jan 1, 2007; Football~

darthbob88 posted:

Stupid CSS question: Is there a way to set styling on "if this element, or any of its subelements, have/lose focus", analogous to the way :hover works? My boss is insisting that we make the UI react the same to tab-navigation as to mousing around, and that's the problem. At present I'm considering A) Explaining to him that this isn't entirely viable, or B) Using jQuery or something to toggle a class for "this-element-has-focus". I suspect B is the better answer, but want to confirm.

Is there some reason why :focus or :focus-within selectors don't work for what you want to do?

Like this https://codepen.io/anon/pen/mKPryR

# ? Jun 5, 2018 00:53

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

spacebard posted:

Is there some reason why :focus or :focus-within selectors don't work for what you want to do?

Like this https://codepen.io/anon/pen/mKPryR

I wasn't aware :focus-within was an option, but that does look like what I need. Thanks!

# ? Jun 5, 2018 03:19

Sywert of Thieves: Nov 7, 2005; The pirate code is really more of a guideline, than actual rules.

Current ways recruiters bother me unsolicited:
- sending linkedin friend requests with their pitch in the 'free text' field
- sending linkedin messages with their pitch
- sending me emails

New ways recruiters bother me:
- cold-calling me and pretending I know who they are
- sending me fricking GDPR privacy updates with their fricking pitch in the email as well

:fuckoff:

Maybe I should just remove 'skills: php' from my profile.

# ? Jun 5, 2018 07:15

Loezi: Dec 18, 2012; Never buy the cheap stuff

Anybody have a good idea of how using CDNs (or, say, Google Fonts) should be taken into account with regards to GDPR?

# ? Jun 5, 2018 19:51

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

A CDN doesn't store personal data, or at least nothing you don't have duplicated elsewhere, so it doesn't seem like any concern to me

# ? Jun 5, 2018 21:13

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

On the other hand, I've read some speculation that logging an IP might be considered personal data in some circumstances, so it might still be. And that's not even getting into all the other header data that can be used to fingerprint user agents. We can't know for sure until someone takes someone to court.

# ? Jun 5, 2018 21:48

The Merkinman: Apr 22, 2007; I sell only quality merkins. What is a merkin you ask? Why, it's a wig for your genitals!

Munkeymon posted:

On the other hand, I've read some speculation that logging an IP might be considered personal data in some circumstances, so it might still be. And that's not even getting into all the other header data that can be used to fingerprint user agents. We can't know for sure until someone takes someone to court.

So by figuring out if the law applies to the user, the website is in violation of the law?

# ? Jun 5, 2018 22:03

IAmKale: Jun 7, 2007; やらないか; Fun Shoe

The Merkinman posted:

So by figuring out if the law applies to the user, the website is in violation of the law?

I think it's only an issue if you actually save the user's IP address somewhere. Using it ephemerally while the request is live and ignoring it afterwards would probably be fine.

# ? Jun 5, 2018 22:49

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

The Merkinman posted:

So by figuring out if the law applies to the user, the website is in violation of the law?

IP ranges aren't a safe way to determine that, anyway.

# ? Jun 5, 2018 23:27

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

If you just assume that all users should receive the privacy benefits of the law, you don't have this problem.

# ? Jun 6, 2018 00:13

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

All users should receive the privacy benefits, but its not entirely clear what those privacy benefits are and its (apparently...I haven't had to deal with it much yet) easy to run afoul of one potential interpretation while trying to meet the requirements of another potential interpretation.

# ? Jun 6, 2018 00:18

porksmash: Sep 30, 2008

Is it your responsibility or the CDN's responsibility to be GDPR compliant? (specifically regarding linked CSS or JS or whatever delivered by CDN)

# ? Jun 6, 2018 01:05

Loezi: Dec 18, 2012; Never buy the cheap stuff

porksmash posted:

Is it your responsibility or the CDN's responsibility to be GDPR compliant? (specifically regarding linked CSS or JS or whatever delivered by CDN)

Yeah, that's the question I'm struggling with most. At least Google Fonts is explicitly processing personal information, since they state that they collect, store and analyze logs with IP data. It's about whether there is a controller-processor relation between you and the CDN or whether the CDN is simply a controller in a new relation (that you are not a party to) between it and the user you served your page to. Since it's your website that initiates the contact between you and the CDN, my hunch is that the interpretation has to be that you are the controller (since you decided that processing should happen) and the CDN is a processor only. But at the same time, that seems silly since that would make embedding any assets from a third party site a huge mess, since you'd need to get a DPA with all the organizations behind the web services you are hotlinking to.

I dunno, I might be overthinking this.

# ? Jun 6, 2018 07:41

Sywert of Thieves: Nov 7, 2005; The pirate code is really more of a guideline, than actual rules.

Law is hard. Let's just block all users from countries within the EU. :suicide:

# ? Jun 6, 2018 07:53

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# ? May 16, 2024 11:13

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Host your own fonts

# ? Jun 6, 2018 12:16

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > The Web Design & Development Megathread

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