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ZeBourgeoisie posted:Okay, I'm quite new to the world of web design, so my sites so far are horrible. The first website I've ever made for an actual client is a free website for a Christian preschool being built in Brazil but funded by my city's church. I worked face to face with my clients, a polite woman who spoke fluent English and a man who didn't speak a lick of English.  Welp. You have your work cut out for you. I agree with Xoidanor's advice. The whole structure is a mess and never use tables ever*. I don't even know how you'd fix some of the positioning issues without just starting over. Some additional pointers: Never ever center align body text. Also get rid of that rainbow gradient thing and never use it again on anything ever. I don't think I've seen something like that on a website since 1998 and it looked horrible and tacky then. For this particular project, you might want to look into utilizing an HTML/CSS website template. These templates will have the HTML structure and a stylesheet already set up, so all you need to do is plug in your own content and make modifications (add your own header image, change the fonts, etc). You can let the template take care of more difficult stuff like positioning, and you can focus on the stylistic side of things. On looking at other sites, use Chrome Dev Tools/Firefox Firebug and check out all the websites you visit so you can get an idea of how they are constructed. Reverse engineering websites and modifying existing designs (Wordpress themes, in my case) was how I got my start, and now I have a job doing web-based UI/UX design and front-end development. I went to school for design and picked up the web development on my own. Learning it is quite doable. The best way to do that is to actually go make websites. It's okay to utilize templates and such. And throw out/un-bookmark any books or online resources that led you down the erroneous path of using tables for layout. *Tables do have their (singular) use. Tables are only ever appropriate for tabulated data. They were never intended to be used for layout and now that we have CSS, they should never be used for layout or anything other than containing data that belongs in tables/spreadsheets. I guess I'm saying this because the app thing I'm working on utilizes a lot of tables for displaying event logs and stuff so I've been thinking about tables a lot.
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Aug 29, 2013 17:13
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ZeBourgeoisie posted:Yeah, I got most of my books from Half Priced Books, which was probably a bad idea thinking about it. They must have been old as hell because they said the box attribute of CSS was not reliable and that tables where still the standard. Oh wow, those books must be loving ancient. Tables haven't been standard for layout for like ten years or something, and I don't think I've ever actually used the CSS box attribute (or seen it used), and CSS is ubiquitous and perfectly reliable these days. Even my CSS book from 2006 only ever addresses tables in the context of tabulated data. The one thing about web development books is that they get dated really quickly. You're better off using online resources that update themselves in a timely manner. Get rid of those old books. If you do better having a physical book for learning (I definitely do), make sure you have the latest editions. As for the rainbow effect... I've done plenty of design projects were I've had to save clients from themselves and their horrible design ideas, especially if said horrible idea makes me look like a bad designer. I suggest compromising by making a cute rainbow-colored title in Photoshop and placing it as an image. Nothing wrong with the rainbow idea itself necessarily, it's just really bad-looking and dated rendered in a browser.
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Aug 30, 2013 04:03
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pipes! posted:Here is a nice post about the "Dribbblisation of design", discussing both how echo chambers are dangerous places, and it tends to produce things that look pretty, but don't function well: This is a wonderful articulation about one of my biggest gripes in UI/UX. My favorite part about doing UI is solving problems and figuring out how to parse and manipulate data in meaningful ways and making a bunch of ugly sketches and HTML prototypes. My least favorite part is doing the graphic art part of it. I work on a piece of browser-based enterprise software and it's fascinating looking at competitors because none of them actually solve the problem effectively (it's the same as all those weather apps). In one case, the app is gorgeous, but all it does is present you with obscene amounts of data and barely does anything to help you actually figure out what that data means. I even told my boss at one point that an ugly interface that's good is miles better than a pretty interface that sucks. It's really easy to make an ugly but good UI look pretty (CSS fun time!), but it's really hard to make a pretty but crappy UI good (back to drawing board, recode the whole loving thing). The only reason we've even dealt with aesthetics at all at this point (early in development) is to make the software more visually appealing to potential buyers, but still, making it look good is secondary to making it work right.
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Sep 26, 2013 23:26
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:Thank you for the responses! No PHP/MySQL certainly cuts down on your options.. And Wordpress is written in PHP, so there's no getting around that. I guess check out Django CMS? It's Python-based. I don't have experience with it personally, but lots of people like it.
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Feb 28, 2014 01:33
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