Web Design

A recent post by Eris Free on her “binary roots” struck a chord with me, especially:

Thanks to Jim Amos for this idea and for giving me a reason to avoid doing client work on a Sunday morning. Read More

Keith’s recent post on the use of title attributes and the subsequent discussion that followed was helpful in clearing up how they, and alt attributes, should be appropriately used. Read More

Like Eris, I get way more inquiries than I can handle, even after I added some general pricing info on my site to weed out potential customers whose budget didn’t match my fee range and people who’s inquiries really weren’t that serious. Read More

When I look back at the code behind some of my earlier sites I am shocked by how bloated and downright ugly it is. I cringe at the nested tables, I wince at the liberal use of spacer gifs and am I embarrassed by my poor use of CSS. Read More

This question gets debated a lot, and seems to have recently risen to prominence again in some well known blogs. And rightly so, of course, for even though the majority of us would do this stuff for free, it does help to be able to afford to keep that roof over your head.
This question is particularly tricky for people starting out in the web design business, so I thought I’d give my take, based on my own experience.

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Keith and I were having a discussion today about what should be the upper size limit for home pages. This has carried on into an interesting thread at Asterisk.

At the hospital, we (the web team) are often asked to create a web-based this or that, such as a form or some kind of app. In the majority of cases such requests represent a huge amount of over-engineering based on the user requirements of the form or tool and the amount of use it is likely to get.

For example, creating a web-based form involves a fair amount of work for the developer and a not inconsiderable development time as there things to include like emailing a copy to the person completing the form and making sure it prints properly. It usually takes several iterations to get right.