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How do people go about finding web developers / designers these days? I work for a small publishing company and the website host/developer that we have now is someone who bought out the web consulting business from someone else and simple website hosting is not what he bought the company for. There is an issue with the wordpress theme for an author's website (which prevents me from making any changes to the theme pages/configuration) and the guy can't be bothered to look into it so we're looking at moving to a new host and starting a relationship with someone who wants to do this crazy thing in which we exchange currency for labor performed. I don't feel like our requirements are very high at all. We'd probably want something along these lines:
We're also looking to add some sort of store/shopping cart integration that is easy enough to manage. The point of the store is not to selling product all the time, more like limited-run one-off occasional things for sale so I don't really want to do shopify or something. Woocommerce maybe? Several goals for the store would be:
Assuming all would go well we have another very basic website we'd like to get done as well, but the author's website is more of a priority.
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Jan 14, 2021 20:49
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Something like that a marketing firm would be the best bet imho. That's who I contract with and we use wordpress and woocommerce. Sounds like a simple project too.
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Jan 14, 2021 20:56
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dreesemonkey posted:How do people go about finding web developers / designers these days? Which of these requirements aren’t met by a Wix site?
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Jan 15, 2021 01:31
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dreesemonkey posted:How do people go about finding web developers / designers these days? The place I work would definitely be happy to do something like this. Heck, it might even be me that ends up doing it. I'll hit you with a PM.
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Jan 15, 2021 18:56
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To CarForumPoster's point squarespace and wix are more than capable to handle such a site.
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Jan 15, 2021 19:47
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dreesemonkey posted:How do people go about finding web developers / designers these days? I'd use Wordpress + WooCommerce (a Wordpress plugin). The trick would be finding a Wordpress dev who knows what they're doing, i.e. someone who isn't going to bungle it up with too many plugins that bloat your site and leave you in a bind when something breaks due to an update or not updating, and won't disappear randomly. A bad Wordpress developer is just going to charge you an arm and a leg for them to use a template + a dozen plugins and collect a check - in which case you basically paid much more for something Wix could have done - but a good one will be expensive. A Wix/Squarespace site will look good (because it's a template) for cheaper, but I've found they always end up looking kind of ugly if someone who doesn't have an eye for UI/UX and design is in charge of adding content, especially images. As a web designer, recommending Wix goes against my survival instincts, but it might work for what you need vs. a totally custom site.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:27
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LifeLynx posted:As a web designer, recommending Wix goes against my survival instincts, but it might work for what you need vs. a totally custom site. Honestly, having put together a bunch of Wordpress + WooCommerce sites for people, I think for anyone on a budget they're way better off with a turnkey solution like Wix, Squarespace or Shopify in 2021. I've stopped recommending Woocommerce as an option for our clients. Even with a good developer setting it up, Wordpress is too much of a minefield for long term support for ecommerce (in my opinion). Especially considering it's more complicated for the store/site owner to manage than one of the turn key options.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:39
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WP + Woo is good if you have a WP developer on retainer and expect to run a bigass site that requires a lot of customization. Otherwise Shopify is probably the better option for most simple e-commerce sites. Squarespace and Wix are fine mostly static sites, but their e-commerce offerings are not as robust as Shopify.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:47
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Wp is good for any kind of content manager. A brochure site, not really. WooCommerce is also loving annoying because most of the best features are behind a pay wall.
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Jan 16, 2021 00:32
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I’m still pretty sure that wix satisfies all of those requirements. I love Django, flask, dash, etc. but when I needed to get an e-commerce site up that my friend could self publish and maintain on wix had her up and going in no time. If she ends up needing something custom wix let’s you hire devs to extend their stuff. SEO is at least thought of, though tbh I’ve never tried a wix site with action based analytics.
CarForumPoster fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Jan 16, 2021 |
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Jan 16, 2021 01:59
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I would use Wix or Squarespace or Shopify. You don't need to get any software developed to satisfy your requirements.
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Jan 16, 2021 05:43
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Thanks for all the input, it's helpful. I will definitely look into all these options. The store requirement is kind of funny because I'm pretty sure when they do sell things they're effectively losing money, it's more of a way to appease the fans who want a signed book or something similar. Even then they don't offer them year round, just once or twice a year since all books are personalized. I (personally) have a gut-reaction to paying these recurring store fees for these online selling platforms when the store is an overall loss-leader anyway. Maybe I can convince them to just try and do an etsy site or something and get over the "want to have it be a part of the site" requirement.
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Jan 16, 2021 17:30
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This might be the wrong place to ask, but I’ve got a web form that I need to fill out and submit 60+ times a week. I’ve written a script with selenium that inputs the details and just leaves me to complete the reCAPTCHA at the end of it. The problem is reCAPTCHA really doesn’t like that I’ve used selenium to fill out the form. I have to complete it at least half a dozen times for each submission before it decides that I’m not a robot, and the image refreshes happen at a glacier pace. At the moment it’s taking me just as long to complete the reCAPTCHA as it would to fill out the form manually. Is there anything I can do to help with this? I don’t expect to beat it automatically, but it would be nice to be able to only have to complete it once for each submission. I’m using the chrome web driver for Mac if that makes any difference.
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Jan 18, 2021 15:00
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Tea Bone posted:The problem is reCAPTCHA really doesn’t like that I’ve used selenium to fill out the form. I have to complete it at least half a dozen times for each submission before it decides that I’m not a robot, and the image refreshes happen at a glacier pace. This is something you might have to explore more before figuring out the workaround because the captcha not working because "it doesn't like selenium" doesn't totally make sense - especially given that it's an intermittent thing. Would be better to figure out the mechanism of action (like maybe selenium is clearing cookies / localstorage or something). As an alternative to using selenium, you can just run whatever javascript you want by making a bookmark with java script: bunch of vanilla js - so maybe just write a vanilla js script that fills in the form and run it by hitting the bookmark . But without knowing why it doesn't work with selenium, can't tell whether that workaround will work. Maybe open javascript debugger, turn on "break on all exceptions" and see if something is coming up when your script runs in selenium?
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Jan 18, 2021 15:19
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:This is something you might have to explore more before figuring out the workaround because the captcha not working because "it doesn't like selenium" doesn't totally make sense - especially given that it's an intermittent thing. Would be better to figure out the mechanism of action (like maybe selenium is clearing cookies / localstorage or something). Sorry, yeah I didn't mean specifically that selenium is the problem, rather selenium is doing something which is making it seem suspect, it's not an intermittent thing though, it's everytime. And thanks, I hadn't actually considered just writing the script in JS and saving it to a bookmark. That probably makes more sense anyway since it's going to be used by someone without any programming/scripting knowledge.
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Jan 18, 2021 15:44
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recaptcha checks for headless browsers; in general no one using recaptcha wants a headless browser to be able to pass it.
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Jan 18, 2021 16:13
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Isn’t this the whole point of adding a CAPTCHA, to block scripts and scripted submissions? I know it’s frustrating for you but I imagine the people who put it in would be happy.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:08
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Tea Bone posted:This might be the wrong place to ask, but I’ve got a web form that I need to fill out and submit 60+ times a week. Can you use use vanilla chrome to fill it out or a browser extension? Chrome has form filling built in. If you're logged in to a google account and not incognito it should work pretty good.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:32
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smackfu posted:Isn’t this the whole point of adding a CAPTCHA, to block scripts and scripted submissions? I guess so, but I'm not trying to bypass the CAPTCHA all together. I'm happy to manually fill out the CAPTCHA, I'd just rather it not eat up ~5 minutes each time. Honestly, I think they just threw the CAPTCHA on there without really thinking about it, this is a bad implementation of something that should have been a CSV upload. It's not even a single page form, every field is on its own page 
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Jan 18, 2021 20:42
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Don't suppose it's the kind of thing where you can test it in a non-prod environment where the ReCAPTCHA can be configured to bypass or always-accept mode?
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Jan 19, 2021 05:05
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Data Graham posted:Don't suppose it's the kind of thing where you can test it in a non-prod environment where the ReCAPTCHA can be configured to bypass or always-accept mode? No unfortunately not. Without going into identifying detail, it's to register covid test results with a government body so it's not like I can call their tech support and ask them to change their web app just for us.
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Jan 19, 2021 17:06
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Tea Bone posted:No unfortunately not. Without going into identifying detail, it's to register covid test results with a government body so it's not like I can call their tech support and ask them to change their web app just for us. I do a lot of selenium based scraping and often am dealing with Captchas during the development of them scrapers. I find that if I am using chrome, not incognito and logged in to a google account that the captchas are usually not max tier difficulty. That said, captcha actually has a difficult/strictness slider that you select when configuring it in the console. If they turned theirs all the way up, not much you can do. Does it work fine from a not selenium browser? Have you tried looking at the actual request headers to see what might be tipping it off?
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Jan 19, 2021 18:11
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CarForumPoster posted:I do a lot of selenium based scraping and often am dealing with Captchas during the development of them scrapers. I find that if I am using chrome, not incognito and logged in to a google account that the captchas are usually not max tier difficulty. That said, captcha actually has a difficult/strictness slider that you select when configuring it in the console. If they turned theirs all the way up, not much you can do. Does it work fine from a not selenium browser? Have you tried looking at the actual request headers to see what might be tipping it off? It uses JS based checks along with a significant amount of fingerprinting. Selenium exposes a lot of obviousness points. https://www.npmjs.com/package/puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth is usually used in attacks we get to try and bypass as much captcha/attack detection stuff as possible
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Jan 19, 2021 18:19
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Forgot to add this attachment. Pretty much every major site and captcha service will do checks similar to these to harass browser automation at an absolute minimum, just one of thousands. Most will also abuse WebGL UNMASKED_RENDERER to check if your GPU is remote desktop, VNC, Microsoft Basic Display, MESA, VMware, VirtualBox, etc. and ban you. Several services port scan you and your LAN both externally and internally on common ports to determine if you are potentially listening on any remote services like RDP or VNC and ban you also. (They use WebRTC/RTCPeerConnection to get your LAN segment netblock, then websocket or img onerror timing attacks to port scan your localhost/lan from your browser) Impotence fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Jan 20, 2021 |
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Jan 20, 2021 02:30
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fireraiser posted:I can't seem to appreciate any other front-end framework's template syntax now after using JSX for a few years. It all looks like yucky old mustache or angular 1.x to me. I have very little interest in Svelte because I can't use my existing tooling to statically analyze/lint its templating the way I can with JSX, since JSX maps 1-to-1 with JS.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:02
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I am suddenly questioning whether web development is the right choice for me (trying to change careers from SEO) I have been studying web development for about a month now. I had been having a ton of fun learning via freecodecamp, youtube videos, and code-alongs. It was fascinating to learn more about how web pages are built. I even liked little exercises with no goals on my own page, just making a grid or a flexbox nav. However, I just started a project from frontendmentor.io and I had a somewhat miserable time trying to create the menu from the challenge. Instead of being creative and just seeing what happens, I am trying to recreate a professional design. I'm having zero fun doing it. I also feel like I've retained surprisingly little from my learning. Is it normal to feel way out of my depth when I switch over from tutorials to doing it completely myself? Also, if I'm not having fun anymore without following along with a video or completing little mini-challenges, is that a sign that maybe Web Dev is not the career for me?
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Jan 26, 2021 15:37
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blue squares posted:I am suddenly questioning whether web development is the right choice for me (trying to change careers from SEO) Web dev being the relatively lowest hanging fruit also means that it is mostly filled to the brim with competition and the wages and compensation for it are nearing rock bottom!
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Jan 26, 2021 16:06
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blue squares posted:I am suddenly questioning whether web development is the right choice for me (trying to change careers from SEO) Here is a terrible analogy: tutorials are like building Ikea bookcases. You get the pieces already sized, you follow the instructions, and you wind up with a functional thing. Then you try to make a custom built-in in an old house where the walls are not quite parallel, there is only a rough sketch of what the thing will look like, the wood all needs to be sized, and you have to do your own joinery. Development is all about the problem solving that goes into building something based on the tools and knowledge you have. If you don't enjoy that problem solving, then it may not be right for you. That said, the 10th time you build a custom bookcase, it goes a hell of a lot easier than the first, because you learned from all your mistakes on the previous 9 jobs. Making mistakes (or as you said it, being creative and seeing what happens, which is a much better way to put it!) is how you learn and grow as a developer. But it is okay to not enjoy that, and just enjoy having learned some of the stuff behind the curtain of the web.
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Jan 26, 2021 16:07
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Lumpy posted:But it is okay to not enjoy that, and just enjoy having learned some of the stuff behind the curtain of the web. That's definitely true, and if nothing else I am glad I have learned what I have so far! However, I am really trying to stop doing SEO, so I need to find something I will enjoy more!
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Jan 26, 2021 16:23
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How is SEO even a full time job and not just an aspect of a designers job.
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Jan 26, 2021 16:25
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The Fool posted:How is SEO even a full time job and not just an aspect of a designers job. …why would SEO be done by a designer?
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Jan 26, 2021 16:38
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Idfk, developer then? My question is, how is SEO by itself enough of a job for a full person, and not something to be done by whomever is already making the website?
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Jan 26, 2021 16:47
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Seo involves copywriting, which developers are not good at
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Jan 26, 2021 16:50
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The Fool posted:Idfk, developer then? In my personal experience most developers I have worked directly with have not known enough about SEO to succeed with competitive keywords, especially in the lower to mid-market budget range websites I work with. It's also about the amount of time needed to maintain SEO -- some pages are set it and forget it, but when you are in a competitive industry then your competitors will be doing new things that you in turn need to respond to. Plus, keeping up with the reporting, helping the client with research into possible new opportunities, etc. It's nothing that a developer who knows some SEO couldn't do, but it all takes time.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:09
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The Fool posted:How is SEO even a full time job and not just an aspect of a designers job. imho: Is the other way around. A good web designer know basics about SEO. So make good websites that are easy to index by Google or others. A good designer don't need to know the last minute detail of what or what not the google enginers consider a good website this week. Somebody full into SEO has to know that poo poo. SEO also borders into dealing with social networks, that have han API. To know what is possible with these apis takes time, that a good dosigner don't need to know to the gritty details. But a SEO person should know if he can do backlinks in linkedin, or how to get the number of views of a post in facebook. Is good that SEO people exist, so good web designers can do other things where his experience is better served.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:52
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blue squares posted:I am suddenly questioning whether web development is the right choice for me (trying to change careers from SEO) Web development is an incredibly finicky, complicated endeavor with thousands of hidden gotchas you never imagined might exist until you run into them in the wild. Coding a menu from a design comp might seem simple in theory until you actually try it because there are hundreds of moving parts even in the simplest of designs. Even when finally, after a terrible amount of effort, you've finished implementing the menu, you still have the fun of browser testing. Did you forget to declare your box model? Have fun figuring out why everything is bigger than it should be in old versions of IE! Did you use CSS3 or ES6 Javascript without a compiler? Have fun with the multitude of error messages you'll soon face in older browsers! Are colors strangely brighter and more saturated in Firefox than they are in Chrome or Edge or Safari? Have fun figuring out why Firefox is choosing its own, special snowflake color space! Wait until you find a way to target a single version of a specific browser to fix a dumb issue that's been plaguing you for weeks only to have the entire industry shout you down: browser-specific CSS is wrong and bad and you are Literal Hitler for even considering it! Obviously the correct way to solve the problem is by using a bleeding edge framework that will require you restructure your entire application. And these are just coding problems you'll have to deal with, I haven't even mentioned clients yet. Imagine you're building a car for a client and they say, "yeah, I like what you did with this car, but why doesn't it fly? Also, I tried driving it underwater and now the car you built is at the bottom of a lake and a family of fish lives in it, why didn't you make my car a submarine?!" Imagine a 63 year old client with an astigmatism who, for no apparent reason, has their browser set to render all fonts as Curlz MT and sends you weekly emails wondering why everything on their website looks like utter poo poo. I've been in this industry for almost two decades, which is terrifying. Do I enjoy it? Sometimes. Does it have its highs? Absolutely. If I could go back in time and stop myself from heading down this career path, would I? Probably. This is an old piece, but it's still probably the best explanation of what it's like to work in this industry: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
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Jan 26, 2021 18:10
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don't forget the part where there's an ocean of difference between writing html and css to build a wordpress theme and webpack rollup jsx languages that compile into other languages that compile into javascript
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Jan 26, 2021 18:15
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The Fool posted:Idfk, developer then? SEO != making sure you use clean semantic code It's a marketing job that requires a bunch of time spent analyzing data and making content decisions to test and measure business impacts.
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Jan 26, 2021 18:36
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kedo posted:This is an old piece, but it's still probably the best explanation of what it's like to work in this industry: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks That was hilarious. It also sounds terrible and little technology things making no sense and nobody being able to explain why can sometimes drive me up the loving wall and send me to stress city. Sounds like something I need to get a handle on if I want to go further.
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Jan 26, 2021 19:12
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I really like web development, but if you don't like being in situations where you're banging your head against the wall trying to figure something out then programming may not be for you.
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Jan 26, 2021 19:17
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