A month ago I answered a CL ad for a site redesign job. I was answering a lot of ads all at once and didn’t keep track of them all.I got a few responses and did some work as a result but the overall return was disappointing.That’s ok, I had a lot of work to do on my portfolio site and also the downtime forced me to log back into myspace after avoiding it(a time waster) for a month.This reconnected me to a few people I’d forgotten were so cool. It was myspace and it’s community of myspace coders who got me into web design in the 1st place.Because after a year of working on my page I thought:why not do it outside of the myspace restrictions? And that was how I began.Probably not the most orthodox introduction to web design but it was what got me started.So…Back to the story.I was waiting for 2 people to send me their photos on disc,I can’t do much to the bar lounge site I’m working on now until I get them. I can’t start this other job until my client signs up for hosting (I’m making him do it by himself) and gives me his login info and sends me pix as well.
Which means I was back to thumbtwiddling.Yesterday an email came through from that batch of ad responses I sent out one month earlier. I reread my original email which was not professional at all.I stated I was bored out of my skull and would do the redesign for half of her price.The fact of needing more working sites to stock my portfolio with drives me to say crazy stuff.
I love this stuff. I’ll do it for free and I would like to make $ doing something I love. But I should be careful of desperation plus boredom.Because I committed to a site redesign on a free hosting plan.There aren’t any hosted ads but there is no php support or even a cgi-bin…I can’t use my toolbox of scripts and it’s back to the barebones of web site development.I know: you can make some very nice pages without server side scripting.CSS and html or xhtml(what I use) are the meat.PHP is the frosting.
Tag: clients
Am I ready?
I was on Craigslist looking at computer gigs/web design.
So far it doesn’t look like I have what they all want.They want Flash and Mysql.They want shit I haven’t even looked at !
It’s amazing-you can study web design stuff forever (I’ve been for over 3 years) and never know enough.And these job posters post ads that actually call for a programmer as well as a designer so it kind of pays to know both.
I was able to confidently answer 3 ads. I don’t even expect to get paid but just want the experience.
And, you know, fuck it. I should be drawing.
There must be a glut of web site designers
While I was on Craigslist looking for a fridge I saw people offering their services in web design.Some were asking as much as 400 dollars for a four page html,css and javascript site.With add-ons like a guestbook costing more.
From my own experiences with web design I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of folks seem to care more about appearance than functionality.
And I ‘ve also realised that for a business site, a guestbook is really not all that important.
It’s even a little unprofessional-because with spam everywhere you are bound to get animal porn posted into your guestbook that other’s will see when they visit. And even the most on top of it site administrator won’t be able to vet all the spam one gets.
I know that when I was designing my dad’s site I thought a guestbook was like the most important thing to get running and I was really proud of the results.But hardly any one ever signed it.It looked good and that was about it.
I think I don’t know what people want from a site, anyway when they go to it.Do they
really just want to be shown what’s for sale and have it easy to buy on line? The Stone Street Press (my dad’s site) web site has gone through all these changes while I tried to make up my mind how to make his user interface clear and clean. But we still get feedback from some less internet savvy types (not everybody on the web is 23) who don’t know what a buy it now button means or how to use the navigational system to get to the other pages.
But I think that 85 percent of his visitors get it .I mean, if you are shopping online it probably isn’t your first day doing so.You’ve probably been to Amazon or Ebay, and you probably have a PayPal account.
And you’ve probably already been introduced to a variety of different types of navigations, horizontal, vertical, vertical drop down and etc. I based mine on one I got from a template and it is a standard sidebar type with a list style.
As I was working on the SSP site I used a few navigational menus. I even tried out the Sons of Suckerfish navbar. I didn’t like the way all the select boxes would drop down over the web page’s content and obscure it,though. To me it looked messy.But I kept it for a couple of pages.
Although I did experiment with a php powered navigation, I stuck with an html and css one because I am a lot more comfortable with those and php is really new to me. I only started working with it a month ago.
You can see the an example of a list style navigation menu
HERE
And the Sons of Suckerfish drop down select style can be seen
HERE
And here is a link to the cool guys from HTMLdog who designed it with tons of html tutorials and downloads:Here
Personally for my own taste I like the tabbed horizontal style navigational bar like this one HERE
That was a page I made using an Ajax powered script I got from Dynamic Drive. I should find that link to them I have it somewhere… Here it is:
But I got a php blog set up instead and even though I really loved the way this script worked and the navbar-we decided a blog was better for sharing photos and stories with the public.
You can see the blog HERE
I got the blog package from These nice folks.
I had a lot of fun researching all these different methods and even though I relied heavily on good old copy and paste I still had to learn some new tricks.Gasp ,yes I actually learned something!
For instance: Htmldog taught me the cool technique of having the first letter of a line of text be bigger than the rest of the text and even a different color,font face and background color.This makes the web page look more intersting design-wise,more graphically pleasing. And as you probably already know using images can slow down a page’s loading time and also be the last thing to load anyway.So if you are relying on images for your message,your message may never get a chance.
I read that most visitors won’t wait longer than 7 seconds for a page to load.
So it’s really important that all your code be as standards compliant as possible because cleaner code means faster loading.