Tag: ranty mcpanty

Is being a designer like being a contractor?

Well, no because one still doesn’t need to have a license in order to be a working web designer.
But the comparison came to me while I was watching a home improvement show called Holmes on Homes where Mr.Holmes comes in and repairs the shoddy work of contractors who have basically skipped town with the money.
He usually has to tear down walls and rip up floors to get to the problem and he always seems to find bad plumbing,insulation and wiring.This particular episode showed a beautiful home,beautiful in every way cosmetically but underneath the gorgeous framework was a total nightmare.
Of course a home is a much more important thing than a website.
Bad/faulty wiring can kill,which is why contractors must have permits and licenses and their work must be inspected and pass code.
Your badly/outdated coded website will not kill you and may look great on the surface and depending on what you need it to do it might not need to be coded to standards anyway.
But when I’m asked to work on a website that wasn’t built to my standards I sort of feel like that exacting contractor who has nothing but contempt for the other worker and empathy for the ripped off client. In my case however, the client has no idea they’ve been ripped off and I have to be tactful when I explain how I’d like to proceed.I don’t always succeed in being tactful.

There are rules and standards and ethics involved in designing a website for me even though apparently there needen’t be any at all,I’m not held to any work ethic other than the one I make for myself.
Continue reading Is being a designer like being a contractor?

What burns my britches.

I’m a freelance web designer who prides herself on the fact that I care about web standards as well as design. There are lots of people who go on and on about the fact that that’s just a load of hog-wash (they probably don’t believe in Global Warming,either). So they load up Microsoft Frontpage 5.0 and churn out tons of td laden, boxy pages and people pay good money for them.
Oh, what’s she ragging about,now?
We are now in 2008, shouldn’t your site look like it was made in at the very least 2006?
But the way a site looks is actually the least important thing.
To me the most important aspect of being web standards compliant is that the site will render properly in a variety of browsers. It’s reassuring to know that what a visitor sees using Opera is close to the same as a visitor using IE.
There’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on over writing code as water tight as a duck’s ass. I waver because there has to be a line drawn somewhere and for me it’s all those hacks.
Hide from IE 5 mac for crying out loud. Are there people using IE 5 on macs?
I tend to get cross eyed also thinking I should set up a seperate style sheet for print, then for media hand held devices,then for Braille. Braille? You got me there.
If someone can set up a site that someone can read in Braille, pay them 2500 bucks!
They’ve earned it.
Continue reading What burns my britches.

Kicking against the pricks

Why must everything be such a hassle?
Hassle One: My new account with Powweb is totally bolloxed. I was twiddling my dainty thumbs for 2 days waiting for some mess to clear up with how CGI gets enabled for new accounts so that I could get going setting up my dad’s new site just to find out a minute ago that it was enabled improperly.For the record,when a new user signs up a new account with powweb the 1st thing they ought to do is click a little button that enables CGI. Why it isn’t the first thing bang in your face upon activating your new account-I have no idea. It ought to be right there as soon as you login like:

Hello username, would you like to enable CGI on your account so that you might be able to get stuff to work?

Sigh, but that would be too easy. I had to find this out in their community forums…It isn’t top of the list in the knowledgebase,either. It’s also not an easy button to find from the control panel. Whatever.

Hassle Two:The administrator of the domain I need pointed to another nameserver is being…difficult.
I clearly stated what I needed him to do and he wrote me 2x today telling me to “get it together” and send him the info. Which I already had. I gave up getting it transferred to me and just asked him to point it for me. But now that Powweb has decided to poop out I sure hope the domain doesn’t end up pointing toward a website that isn’t set up at all.I have to be able to install WP in order to set things up and I can’t do that until Powweb “gets it together”.Yikes.
So by tomorrow am that website better be working because I am going to have to act super fast to make it ready…if the guy ever does the DNS stuff for me, maybe he’d rather just keep the catty emails coming.