dgibson.net

Sitepoint's "Web Site Revenue Maximizer" - Why?

As I've previously mentioned, I've become a fan of some of Sitepoint's development books lately. However, they've been mailing me about their special promo price for their latest "kit" (book+CD-ROM) called "The Web Site Revenue Maximizer." Their special price (ends today) is $149, and it will soon be nearly $200. For a split second, I thought about ordering before the special expired just to be able to fill in any gaps in my knowledge on this subject. But upon checking out the table of contents and sample chapters, I was left wondering "why bother?" Sure, price positioning is a decision everyone has to make for products, and Sitepoint's kits are priced fairly high, targetting professionals. Sitepoint can sell a few hundred or thousand of these kits promising that readers will make the money back and make some serious cash. But with the other excellent free resources out there, I don't see the point in buying into this kit in the first place.

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Leveraging CSS is 75% Markup and 25% CSS

I really planned to do more ColdFusion blogging, but I find myself more intrigued by CSS lately. After all these years there still seems to be some mystique about CSS to some developers and designers alike.

Over the past couple of years I've been refining my process for creating site layouts and modular CSS. During that time, most of the refactoring involved has been reworking parts of the markup to be more modular or to use markup that meets my (now) more strict semantic requirements (than when I first started using CSS) and provides all of the hooks for the techniques I may want to apply with CSS. I'm still refining some smaller things here and there, as I discover new techniques.

I recently returned to working on the application that I did my very first table-less CSS layout on, and looking at the markup, I can see what a difference semantic markup makes!

I've been using CSS since 1998 (more heavily in 1999), but didn't really know the best practices in markup until the last few years, making my initial efforts at CSS layouts frustrating attempts of trial and error - not unlike the experience of using CSS in Netscape 4! I actually abandoned my first attempt at redesigning Metalunderground.com in CSS because the layout was too complex for me to pull off. I finally opted for a wrapper table and minimally nested table layout. (Note: Metalunderground.com has since been redesigned twice, first using CSS and then a recent underlying code cleanup, which helped immensely for general coding and CSS-specific techniques).

As many developers and designers can attest, learning CSS itself isn't as hard as knowing which techniques to use in various scenarios, the drawbacks to certain techniques, and how to work around browser-related bugs. Some techniques such as floats versus absolute positioning are purely CSS, but a number of other techniques are based on how you've chosen to mark up your document.

Compound that with the sad truth that many web designers and developers - even experienced ones - don't really know proper HTML or XHTML, much less the best practices of semantic markup, and you can see why CSS still appears difficult after all these years. I was in the same position about five years ago, having used CSS for several years, but still struggling with CSS layout due to not using the best practices for the underlying markup or knowing the proper techniques to use.

So why is it that many developers don't know proper HTML or XHTML? I've encountered all sorts of reasons for this - legitamate and not - over the years. Here are some of the reason that web developers and designers may not know basic proper (X)HTML markup and therefore may have trouble with CSS layout:

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Get Sitepoint's Photoshop Book As A Free PDF

I've recently become a fan of Sitepoint's web development books - especially their front-end (CSS and JavaScript) and design books. They don't usually offer much ground-breaking material, but they are good at getting one up to speed on current practices and qualifing the benfits and drawbacks of various techniques.

Sitepoint recently offered up their 278 page book, "The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques," for a limited time free PDF download. I passed on buying this one simply because I don't have a recent version of Photoshop, and unfortunately all the good tutorials and resources are for Adobe Photoshop CS1 (many are CS3 now) and up.

It could be that Sitepoint is planning to update this book to a new edition, as Adobe CS4 is around the corner. Sitepoint previously release a Rails 1.0 book for free download as well, but sent out an email about the Rails 2.0 book and upgrade options. They could be using a similar tactic for this PhotoShop book, but free is still free, so go download it.

Web Developer, Web Designer, or Graphic Designer?

Apart from the disturbing statements I heard about ColdFusion while job hunting earlier this year, another thing that I found interesting was the terminology used for front-end work.

Since I was also looking for CSS work, among other things, I was called for quite a few interface design and web designer positions. It's been a while since I had been job hunting prior to this, so I hadn't really given much thought as to my position title. Afterall, I don't usually pay attention to my title at the places I work even, as they are often made up by Human Resources or other people who don't know the technology much less have any rhyme or reason to them. So "web developer," "software developer," "software engineer," "programmer," etc., (with an optional designation of 1-4 or 1-5) - it doesn't matter to me as long as I am getting paid according to my experience and doing what I like to do, which basically comes down to utilizing my array of skills and having some input into the decision making process on the project.

Back to the topic at hand though. I usually just refer to myself as a "web/application developer." Six years ago I would never have considered myself a "web designer" or a designer at all. Sure, I've been using CSS since the early days (Netscape 4) and Photoshop since version 3, when it came on floppy disks, and have an art background, but I do not have the raw artistic talent and I am generally just not creative on demand (in the artistic sense).

Yet, after hearing all of the types of jobs I was being contacted about, and was actually qualified for, I began to accept the title of web designer for two reasons. First, CSS is how you implement design these days, afterall, and I've gotten pretty good with my CSS layout skills and making them extremely modular. Second, a web designer is simply someone who designs sites and who understands (and respects, IMO) the medium. It has always peeved me when "designers" - who, in light of this discussion, I would now call "graphic designers" instead of "web designers" - push the boundaries without considering the web as a medium and the consequences of their actions on that medium or the landscape of users out there.

In broad terms, considering the web as a medium means understanding the basics of usability and accessibility. These areas span designing for different people and different devices (with different resolutions and various levels of support for underlying web technoligies such as HTML, JavaScript, Flash and more). Wow, those are some broad qualifications for a web designer, who several years ago was traditionally focused on making the site look pretty with graphics. But in reality, a web designer needs to be well-rounded and versed in these areas as well as capable of implementing a design in modern standards-based methods. Without those skills, the person is merely a graphic designer, or perhaps less than spectacular web designer.

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dgibson.net Going On Another 7-Year Hiatus

Dgibson.net going on another 7-year hiatus? Nah. There really aren't any good April Fools pranks that I can play here, on my personal blog. However, I thoroughly enjoy this time of year and creating ficticious stories for posting on my other site,
Metalunderground.com.

You can check out the stories we ran today as well as in previous years with the links below:

• April Fool's Day, 2008
• April Fool's Day, 2007
• April Fool's Day, 2006
• April Fool's Day, 2005
• April Fool's Day, 2004
• April Fool's Day, 2003

Some of the better April Fools I've seen done today are as follows:

• World of Warcraft Announces the Bard Hero Class (I don't even play, but this is really well done)
• World Of Warcraft: The Molten Core (not so funny, but you have to watch the video on that page - it's classic!)
• New Xbox 360 Spring Line

I'll update as I find some more really good ones. I wasn't really impressed with Google's attempt this year, but they've had some great ones in the past.