Web Class Blog

The simple answer, is, NO. You do not have to learn HTML in order to build a website, or work on one successfully.

The long answer is, that if you DO learn a little about HTML, and a little about CSS (try the For Dummies Books), it will make life easier for you. Especially when it comes to troubleshooting display issues, and customizing the appearance of your website inside a CMS.

A grasp of the simpler parts of HTML, such as link tags, div and table tags, paragraph tags, and line breaks, will help you to be able to spot errors and inconsistencies, and correct them. It will help you know when you want to move something from one part of the code to another, just how much you need to move. And it will help you know how to remove a piece from the code without getting errors from it.

Those are all secondary skills though. To start with, you can manage without it, if you use either a good HTML editor program, or a CMS with a template that you like (or if you have a friend who can tweak it for you).

In our classes, we teach our students how to use tools first, then how to recognize various pieces that they are most likely to need to work with directly in code. But that isn’t the focus of the class. The classes focus on more important things – such as working with design elements, good copy, effective promotion, and functional layout and SEO. The things that really determine whether a site is likely to be functional or not.

Learning code does not make you a web designer. Code is perhaps one of the least necessary things to learn, and a basic grasp of it, combined with a good knowledge of other aspects of web design and related skills, will propel you further than you’ll go if you can hand-code.

Many classes which are taught about web design are theoretical. They take research into account, but they are taught with very little of real world experience. It is different in the trenches. When you have to consider the variables that come into play in real life, it puts a huge twist on what is learned in the average web related class.

When you are working within theory, you have more freedom than you do when you are working with a client – or even with your own needs. Consider the following factors that come into play:

1.Budget. This is something that becomes a factor for virtually every small business, and it may affect many aspects, including initial planning, and long term sustainability.
2.Time. A website takes a time commitment from both designer and owner, and reflects directly on costs, both visible, and hidden. Keeping time commitments manageable is almost always an issue.
3.Cooperation. Some clients cooperate, others do not, and you have to find ways to work with them.
4.Personal Preference. This is HUGE. You can do everything “right” and still have it be “wrong”. Or you may have to find another “right” way to do something so that it pleases a client.
5.Industry Standards. These change all the time. What is taught in most classes is obsolete by the time it is taught.
6.Adaptation of standards to reality. Standards are goals – and they aren’t always practical. Sometimes they have to be scaled down, or adapted, to meet realistic needs.
7.Target Market. This is different for each business. One size does not fit all!
8.Individual needs. The needs for function of each site is also unique. You may find that half of your clients have sites that take you outside the box in thinking about how to meet the need.
9.Business goals and objectives. A good website takes into account much more than just the site “spec”. It considers the total business scope, goals, and resources, then provides a solution that fits them all, so that it enhances the objectives of the business for growth and sustainability long term. This isn’t something you can learn from a scenario in a book, it is only learned from real life experiences.

The best kind of class will be taught by someone who actually does the work for a living. They can shed more light on the variations for solutions, and can help to think outside the box better when that is required.

The second issue is that people who do not work with it on a daily basis may not be aware of how intertwined the various aspects of a website are. It is only easy to compartmentalize in theory. In reality, the overlap is fairly pervasive, and you cannot be a true specialist in any one area without having a solid grounding in the other areas that affect it.

Training offered by an experienced teacher – that is, a teacher experienced in daily work with the tasks in question, will usually be more effective for these, and many other reasons.

Comment spam is something everyone thinks they can recognize. But it is getting harder to tell.

I always leave comments on my blogs moderated. Otherwise I’d be overrun by auto-spam.

Auto-commenting is an aggressive form of comment spam, and it is happening in many ways now. It used to be just the horrid old yucky stuff posted with a URL. Now it is more subtle.

Often you cannot pinpoint anything WRONG with the site in question, but it gives you the feeling that it is just a shortcut site – one where someone did not want to put up real content, so they quoted someone else’s posts and left a comment with link instead. Some people think this is an acceptable way to earn from an ad supported website. I do not.

A WordPress Blog allows you to moderate comments, and to mark them as spam. I suspect you have to have some kind of spam control software for that option to be of any good though, because it does not seem to make any difference, the spam keeps coming.

The most annoying thing about auto-spam is that once it gets through, it does not stop unless you find a way to stop it. If you leave comments unmoderated and a spambot finds it, they’ll keep posting, even if you set it to moderated – they’ve long moved on, and the bot just auto-sends to whatever it found on its first pass. No way to turn it off.

So the only way to tell if it is spam, is by taking control yourself, and actually looking. If you judge it to be spam, it is.

Two major things we see that make the difference between professional results in web design, and amateur results, are Experience, and Prioritization.

Some things can only be learned by experience. By having done a thing enough times to know the common pitfalls, to have a system to accomplish it in an efficient manner, and to have an idea of the things that MIGHT be potential problems even if you have not experienced those issues particularly in the past.

Experience is worth paying for – either by hiring someone to do the work, or by paying for a class so you can learn from someone else’s experience. Even then, some things won’t make sense until you actually do them yourself – when YOUR experience combines with the experience of the professionals whom you are relying on.

Prioritization is the other big issue. It often determines whether a site functions well on a limited budget, or whether it does not. It determines whether time is saved, or lost. It determines whether a site can be made functional in six weeks, or a year.

Good prioritization means the foundation is built well before other items are added. And it keeps necessary costs affordable.

These are the two biggest issues that people are likely to NOT understand the importance of before they get involved in a site build process. But they are the two things that, once they see what it means, will make the most difference in whether they have a good experience or a bad one.

Eight years ago, I saw my first website. Five months later, I got my first contract with the Town of Medicine Bow. In web terms, that was in the dark ages.

Back then, you could do that. It was all much simpler.

Things have changed. There are issues now that did not matter then – visitors have expectations, coding is more complex, software harder to learn, marketing issues are more difficult.

When I was learning, if you made a mistake, chances are you’d find out before harm occurred, and you could go on making improvements and learning.

Now, a mistake can kill your site, or your business, land you in court, or get you in trouble other ways.

It is just much harder to learn on your own. Most of the info out there is geared toward corporate web needs, not small business needs, a good deal more is outdated (with no way for you to know that), and some is outright wrong from the get-go.

A class can help you get hands on experience. The best kind of class will teach more than how to use a certain type of software – instead, it will teach the basics in all areas related to creating a website – and that is far more than mere web design!

The web world is changing fast. It is harder now than it was a few years ago to build a good site – but a good training class can give you the boost you need to be able to start with a good enough foundation to compete, long enough to get the site going well.

The image and graphics classes scheduled for this summer will require that you have some kind of Image Processing software. The class is NOT software specific – we will not be teaching you to use PhotoShop, or other popular image software. Rather, we’ll be teaching a set of common skills and techniques which are common to this kind of software.

Suitable software means something that is capable of producing professional quality graphics. We recommend one of the following:

Free Software

• The GIMP is about the only free one that is worth using. Others that we have tested simply could not do even basic tasks to a level that was acceptable. The GIMP though, is fairly flexible, and surprisingly functional, and will do to learn a good range of basic skills, along with some higher end professional tactics. You can download it from the net, free.

Commercial Software

• PhotoShop Elements is our number one recommendation for people with a limited budget, who need a range of good features.
• PhotoShop is the top recommendation for professional level graphics production, if you can afford it.
• PaintShop is also highly functional, and will do the job nicely.
• Painter, or Painter Essentials will work – but it is designed more for artistic use, and works quite differently. The learning curve is not the same as for regular paint  software.

There are a range of less functional software titles out there – but many have missing functions where they limit your ability to do essential tasks.

We will also discuss working with a graphics tablet in the Intermediate class. Our preferred tablet is the Wacom table – pretty much any one will do, and even a small one is a huge advantage for anyone who wants to create computer generated art. If you do not wish to paint, or do photo retouching or altering, then a Wacom won’t be of much use to you. Wacom tablets often come bundled with some version of PhotoShop Elements or Painter Essentials.

Graphics are pretty demanding on a computer, but most graphics software can run on even a limited system. It will be SLOW, but it will work.

The use of Adobe Illustrator, or other Vector Based Graphics software will not be covered. This kind of software operates on very different principles, and is used for different purposes.

One of the finer points of web design involves the use of colors. The eye does things to colors when they are in different environments.

Colors show up differently between monitors and print – most people who work with graphics quickly figure that out. And they quickly figure out that colors also look different from monitor to monitor. There will be variances in hue, saturation, or intensity.

But what they do not figure out easily, is that a color that is in a large block, will look different than a color that is in a thin line – even when you use exactly the same color. Or that a color on a contrasting background will look different than one on a white background – even when the color code is identical.

Experience teaches tricks to compensate for what the eye does – because on screen, it is not what it IS that matters, it is what it LOOKS like it is! Perception is often different than reality, and perception is the thing that matters most.

Using lines or boxes in certain ways can make them look warped also, even when they are not. It can be an interesting effect, but if unintended, just makes things look odd. A good example is at http://www.megafamilies.com – Look at the sidebars. They appear to curve in toward the darker blue headers boxes.

Adjusting for this kind of illusion means that you have to see what is, instead of assuming that because it is precise, that it is right! Sometimes we assume that if we want it to look the same, we need only MAKE something the same, and we don’t understand why it does not look the way we want. I find it interesting that people will know that something doesn’t look right, but won’t know why – so they won’t change it, even though they could easily experiment and figure out how to make it look right.

The eyes often play tricks on our perception of colors and space. Learning to compensate for those adds an extra level of polish to a site, bringing it into the realm of the professional.

Early in the days of the web, colors were limited. Web design was fairly clumsy, and site colors tended to be basic. The web developed a fashion of its own – we saw web pages evolve from one design style to another. We now have the ability to use colors in ways that could not be done several years ago.

This has opened new possibilities for site coordination, and design styles. Many designers though, still start out using older design styles, merely because they are simple. And many new designers have a hard time understanding some of the differences between an ok design, and one that pops.

Usually, when a site design isn’t quite right, the thing that is wrong it really a small thing – just a single color that is a fraction of a shade off – one element in the design that doesn’t quite fit – a contrast that is too bold.  It is often very small, very subtle variances that mark the difference between ho-hum and WOW.

When using backgrounds, gradients, or accent lines, very subtle colors often lend a polish that strong ones cannot. Sometimes the subconscious will send the message of enhanced design, even when the difference is not highly noticeable.

Using more subtle elements in the design puzzles some people at first. They don’t understand why you’d want to wash something out so much that it was not noticeable. But something that is noticeable is often a distraction.

We had a site visitor complain about how distracting a background around the outside of one website was. It didn’t have high contrast – it just looked like draped fabric. But the contrast was just enough to make the background attention-getting. We turned the contrast down even further, eliminating some of the highlights, and the site immediately coordinated better.

A header was made more polished simply by putting a very subtle gradient behind the text and image. The gradient was not something that you’d look at and really even see that it was there – but it changed the feel of the header to lend it more elegance and a message of class.

When putting a border around a page element, a color that is only a little different than the page background will define the area, in a way that is not overbearing. This is NOT something you want to do with text – text requires good contrast. But with accents, go ahead and play with subtle colors!

The message of elegance is often made more successfully to the subconscious mind than it is when it is openly stated. Like the shopkeeper who runs around hollering that he is honest, in comparison to the one who just behaves that way.

So when the site doesn’t look right, try less, not more if you want the design to have impact. Learn more about this in the upcoming Image Processing for the Web series.

A simple HTML website requires few choices – there are limits to what you can do with it, so all choices have to be confined to those limits. Beyond the options for a basic site though, the choices become more complicated.

When you require features that are more advanced, and when you require a combination of those features, the choices can be very confusing. One person says “use this!” another person says “use that!”, and sometimes the people who are telling you that don’t really know what it is that you need, or what the real risks are of the solution they are recommending.

See, most people who use CMS or other script software use something because someone else recommended it to them, and they are familiar with it. They don’t want to learn to use something else, even if that something else is better. They have not done the research they needed to do in the beginning, and may in fact, be going about getting things done the hard way, since they didn’t search out the best solution to do what they needed done in the first place.

For example, we have a client who needed the following:

• A website with an article database, and a shopping cart style catalog, with NO actual cart functions.
• A second website with article database functions, and full shopping cart functions.

This seems simple enough, except we really wanted them to go into the same structure if possible, so that training and maintenance were streamlined.

CRELoaded will do the shopping cart part just fine. But the article database functions are weak, and not flexible enough to do what we needed. CRELoaded could not be made to do the catalog only function without custom programming – something we wanted to avoid. We also needed some specific search functions which would be difficult to achieve with CRE.

Joomla excels at the article organization, and VirtueMart has a good catalog function, and even contained the search function we needed. The cart features were weak though.  In order to make it work, we’d have to spend a lot of time tweaking and troubleshooting – but we could avoid custom programming.

Our choice came down to using one platform for both sites, or using one platform for each site. We ended up going with the Joomla and VM setup – because by doing it that way, we could completely avoid custom programming, long term the maintenance would be streamlined in having to only keep up with one software set, and because we could share templating between the two sites. It was easier to make Joomla and VM do what we needed than to try to warp CRELoaded and make it into something that it was not.

This was one of the more complicated choices we’ve had to make. Because there were other more subtle issues that influenced the choices one way or another. We did look outside these two solutions, but there was nothing else that met our primary criteria for using a system:

1. It had to be well supported by an active developer community.
2. It had to be well used by an active user community.
3. The developer community had to be concerned about both security issues, and usability issues.
4. The platform had to have reasonably easy modules and extensions for expansion options.
5. It had to be sustainable – that means the security patches had to be fairly simple to install, or at least, simpler than the alternatives.
6. It had to do 90% of what we needed out of the box – we did not want to have to install extensions just to get basic functions.

So there were really three major steps to choosing the platform:

1. Assess the needs on a feature by feature basis, and determine how the features had to interact with one another.
2. Select the possible software for the job, based on general criteria (our minimum standards for any software) and specific features that were close to what we needed.
3. Refine the choice to the best one, by analyzing the degree of simplicity and sustainability in implementing each of the possible choices.

A good deal of it has to do with understanding how software works, and what the various feature limitations might be. But no matter what your level of experience, when you do a thing the first time, you take a risk that you might run into an unsolvable problem if you do not verge into custom programming. No degree of experience can prepare you to know the outcome of every single combination of functions.

The day after I began writing this article, another prospect came along. The functions that she needed to have combined were very complex – this kind of site isn’t one that anyone out there within her budget, would be able to say with confidence that they had done anything exactly like it. The combination was very uncommon, and highly specific. But with a good grasp of the possibilities, and an understanding of the interactions, we can predict fairly well what the potential problems will be, and how well they can be overcome.

The point of all this is, that good planning, careful consideration and exploration of the proposed platform, combined with experience, can save all kinds of time, and trouble. When you choose a platform, you are choosing a set of long term limitations, maintenance and upkeep tasks, and potential headaches. If you get the right one, the advantages are maximized, while the headaches are kept to a minimum. And that is worth a little time and research.

The structure of a website is like the foundation for a house. There is a great deal of difference between the foundation for a 2 bedroom cottage, and a four bedroom, two bath house with a basement. You can’t necessarily start with one, and end up with the other, any more than you can start with the wrong kind of site structure, and build on top of it into something else.

Unfortunately, this is one thing that site owners are notoriously bad about. It isn’t because they are unintelligent, but because they are required to do this essential task at the point in their progress where they are least qualified to actually understand what the choices mean!

Even if you are building a simple HTML site, you still need to think about structure. But when you need more than that, it is even more critical. You have to choose between making do with manual tasks in HTML, using a blogging platform to do just a little more, using a simple CMS, a full featured CMS, a shopping cart system, other scripts such as forums, project manager, calendar, or some combination of those components.

The choices you make at the beginning, will, to a large extent, determine where the site can grow before it has to be reconstructed in a different environment. Getting it right saves you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Getting it wrong will cost you from day one.

Good site structure lays the foundation for fluid growth, enhances marketing and SEO efforts, and makes it easy for visitors to get around and find what they need. It is worth getting right.