Comments on: Web Design and Web Development

By: vineshkumar

vineshkumar — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:09:47 +0000

Thanks for posting this very informative article. I have learned a lot. Cheers to a wonderful 2010!
website design New York City

By: rundmw

rundmw — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:00:14 +0000

Great article on a topic of some importance. How far downstream that interface between the "designer" and the "developer" occurs can play a significant role in the success and the pace of the project.

I agree with your conclusion that designers that go beyond the comp, creating good POSH and CSS themselves, are much more valuable than those that do not, and will ultimately produce far better web sites.

Sadly, the vast majority of web designers with whom I have interacted have been either uninterested or incapable of that level of mastery. For them, it's just make a pretty picture and lob the PSD file over the wall for me to convert to html/css. [And I'm terrible at it. Takes me forever, and there is always some little IE bug that trips me up.]

It's always a blessing to work with a designer who has solid downstream POSH/CSS skills. In fact, for those designers, the whole idea of the comp itself is now increasingly suspect.

In summary, when you find such a designer, hug him/her tight and never let him/her go. ;-)

By: bradley-holt

bradley-holt — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:12:22 +0000

@enygma Thanks for your comments! I tend to be somewhat of a purist about the issue. Having POSH as the demarcation point and not needing to know any CSS has freed up brain space for other useful stuff (the day I forget all of the CSS I know I'll be very happy!). You brought up the concept of a CSS "toolkit" which I really like. Another way to think of this "toolkit" is as a set of microformats and poshformats worked on together by the designer and developer. This way the designer has setup reusable parts that the developer can use — but purely through semantic HTML. Again, I admit to being somewhat of purist about this and there probably are situations where it's useful for the developer to know CSS.

By: enygma

enygma — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:02:55 +0000

I whole-heartedly agree that the designers should know HTML/CSS themselves. Those two things are less about the "programming" of the site and more about the "structure". When designers creating their comps, they're creating a structure - the layout of the data and various elements in the page. It only makes sense that they would be the ones to make sure that image correctly translates into a well-structured website. Really, there's no excuse for them not to do it.

On the flip side, I think all web developers (the ones writing the code) should know HTML and CSS too. There's so many places that, if they had to go running back to the designer to fix something every time, the project would be stalled constantly. By knowing this dynamic duo of web layouts, the developers are also able to use the CSS "toolkit" the designer has given them and reuse parts of the site (buttons, background images, etc).