Yeah, that's a nice site Sekka. 

Our creative director did the design. I'm a pure programmer, not designer.

The programming on that site is VERY sloppy though. I'm a lot better when not under those time constraints. 

Client doens't see the code nor do they care, but the people who have to update it do so for common courtesy and just plain making it easy to read you should aways write clean commented code. So you work for THINK? 

We do the updating so it's all good. :)

Aye, I work for them. All fun. 

Sekka, do you have any experience building CMS'? 

Yup. We use one I built from scratch. 100% custom made. I hate all the prebuilt ones, you get exactly what you want when you build it yourself. 

Nice Sekka looks like a great company to work for, and working with guys. Working with chicks is a pain in the ass. They fuckin complian to much and take to long to get shit done. 

Working with chicks is a pain in the ass. They fuckin complian to much and take to long to get shit done.

Welcome to web design in the 1890's 

I wish I had people tell me what they want when I design a site. Every single time I do it, I always have to come up with the theme, design the graphics, and layout the site, then put it all together. I have only ever worked on one site where the graphics were pre-made, and after it was all finished, they started swapping in new graphics to mess it up. :-\ 

I like it better when I get creative control. There's nothing worse than a client who thinks that they know what would look best. 

I wish I had people tell me what they want when I design a site.

Never going to happen. You just need to know when to say no. Customers are always under the impression that since they are payign for it they will get exactly what they want. The thing is they don't know what they want adn that creates scope creep. I give three designs and say you get to choose one. No if ands or butts. After I get a hefty deposit of course. 

yeah, but its nice to get some kind of direction. I waste a lot of up front time trying to come up with ideas and getting some shot down. It would be nice if they had something in mind first. I only do it free-lance so it sucks when its time consuming. 

Just keep taking the money
and let them keep changing their mind. 

Just keep taking the money
and let them keep changing their mind.

Exactly.

As long as you're billing hourly, their indecisiveness is to your benefit. 

"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal."
-- Pablo Picasso

I'm not saying actually steal but get inspirations from others work. oswd.org is a good place to start. And heck if your in a crunch look at pre made templates, just change the look and graphics. The code is mostly already written. It saves a lot of time and you can put your own personal touch. If I have a client who wants something and they don't;' know what they want. I look at their competitions and get their idea. Why re-invent the wheel? 

Just keep taking the money
and let them keep changing their mind.

JP is a wise man! (eh! woman eh! black and in a wheelchair) ;-)

Just let them know up front it will cost. If it taked me ten minutes to do something they get billed an hour. Just like a plumber would do. 

Meh, I'm cheap compared to most designers I think. I normally charge $50 an hour with a free first consultation. Right now its just a free-time "hobby", I'd like to make it a full time job some day... 

in my area (SF Bay Area, a higher level of saturation)
$30 is cheap
$40 is average for an average designer...
$70 is exorbitant

developers:
$40 is cheap
$60 is average for an average developer
$80 is exorbitant 

so, if I do both I can charge $70/hr and be cheap? :) 

power users are in a different bracket, and are usually brought in as coonsultants or project managers and are paid about that... or, if they're lazy, they'll do both for small clients and get paid btwn $40-$60. 

so, if I do both I can charge $70/hr and be cheap? :)

I generally find you can't do both at the same time. 

Sekka said:

I generally find you can't do both at the same time.

Eh, sometimes you have to when you're working for small companies.

So... here is the latest site I'm working on. I just started it last night, so I've been playing with color scheme and layout. Thats what I have so far. The original (unfinished) site can be viewed by removing the /new. Any comments? 

I don't really like the color scheme :\ 

onemanarmy said:

I don't really like the color scheme :\

Well, the logo I was given is the blue and background "brown". So I have to stay within that color realm, but I'm open to ideas, its it kinda meh. 

I must admit the logo doesn't give you much to work with.

By the way, you're programming in XHTML Strict so your single line break tags need to be closed.

aka You are using <br> when you need to use <br />. 

Owned. 

I actually think I owned myself. I debug HTML way too much. :( 

Here is a few color pallet resources tha tmight help.

One

Two

These are both great. 

If your going to use strict doc type you can fix all your tags automatically in Dreamweaver to convert to xhtml.

Ive been learning XML and XLST lately. Pretty cool stuff. 

yeah, DW fixes the <br> to <br />, I did the text real quick last night in crimson editor, I'll fix that when I get the layout right. 

Web Colors
PHP Freaks, tons of php scripts, see also Hot Scripts.com
Codewalkers - my staple PHP site since I first started learning the language
The aforementioned W3Schools.com, a plethora of great information

These are the pages I have bookmarked here at work right now. I've been re-writing our engineering website using LAMP rather than MS Sharepoint that some genius before me decided was a good idea.

I'll go back and truly backread this thread now to see how many sites I re-posted. 

So, I've been fiddling and changed the layout a little bit, better or no? 

I like it better centered, and the color scheme grew on me.
But you should have a closing horizontal line at the bottom of the blue box. 

onemanarmy said:

I like it better centered, and the color scheme grew on me.
But you should have a closing horizontal line at the bottom of the blue box.

I still have yet to put the footer down there, which will close out that box, I don't know if I'm going to separate it from the content yet or not. 

I think if you were to pull the middle content portion out a little, curve the edges slightly, apply a sublte shadow against the background it would counter the dull tones.

But it could backfire, I dunno. 

ok, I think I like the curves better, but I can't get rid of that damn space between the logo and navigation, I have no idea whats causing it. 

png transparency doesn't work in IE. better make it a gif. 

yeah, thats gonna suck, cause it png transparency works in IE7 

Just use the transparency CSS hack.
Don't give up png quality just because 1 browser on the planet doesn't support it.
Being stuck with a 256 color gif isn't always the best solution. 

You see what the css hack does in IE 7 Jibbs? 

yeah, I dont want to use a gif, but a transparent png isn't gonna get enough support I dont think, so I may have to drop the roundness. 

I haven't noticed a difference in IE7.

I've used hacks like this on a few websites and they work fine.

/* This is the IE Hack for PNG Alpha Channel */
div#subHead {
	background: none;
	_filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, 
sizingMethod=scale src='/media/images/header.png');
	width: 487px;
	height: 30px;
	margin-top: 6px;
	margin-left: 6px;
}

/* Non-IE Browsers will pick up the [id] tag */
div#subHead[id] {
	background: url('/media/images/header.png');
}

 

I'm not a big fan of the curves, i think it looked better before.
The background is too close in color to the background on the image, possibly a blue background might be more inviting.

apply a sublte shadow against the background it would counter the dull tones

This is also an option for the current (or another light) background color. 

I know the IE6 hack works, I'm just wondering how IE7 will interpret the hacks. Ive heard some big problems with IE7 and IE6 hacks. I believe hacks are bad techniques and cause more problems than they solve. You might be able to get away with it using conditional comments for browser degradation. 

I think the blue background works with the color pallete, but now I think its kinda plain. I went against the curves because they are too much of a pain with the transparency issues and such. 

Giving the body a top-margin will help give a frame appearance with the background. I think that will make it look better. 

darker/grayer blue. it's too...periwinkle. 

Goodthing said:

Giving the body a top-margin will help give a frame appearance with the background. I think that will make it look better.

Already did that one :-P I think a darker background will distract from the body. I might go lighter though. 

Woohoo. Finished 2 projects this week. They're sat on our dev server waiting to go live.

Starting a rather big website next week. It's for an Art and Design school of a University (sorry I can't be specific).

Fully content managed and scalable, multi-lingual, the works. What makes it tricky is the design. Will be fun :) 

Just imagine how much faster it would be in .NET.