Web Design Methods: The NYTimes.com gets it.

First off, allow me to say one thing..

THANK YOU.

I can't stress how important it is to hear things like this (full article here) when I work as a professional web designer and developer in an area where "web design" is still stuck in the early 90s (yes, that is a legitimate competitor still in business in the area that I just linked to).

I have been hand coding my websites for a number of years now, and let me tell you, once you get comfortable with it, I find no good reason to use WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editors like Dreamweaver except for source control.

For those of you who complain that managing large, complicated websites becomes too much of a burden to be hand coded feasibly, remember this - there is no good WYSIWYG editor for the high quality software that is out today (such as that fancy web browser you use), so why should we skimp on the quality of our websites? I myself studied programming in college, and independently studied x86 Assembly - managing code much, much more complicated than your run of the mill corporate markup and stylesheets. No fancy drag-and-drop system for myself and my fellow coders.

Be strong and actually learn to do your job, rather than take shortcuts that end up affecting the quality of your work. There are times and places for WYSIWYG editors, but in the world of professional web design (especially contracted design), ditch Dreamweaver and grab a good text editor or IDE.

-WFL

Win a free WFL-original 8x10 of your choice!

Here's how it works.. The person with the most creative (and/or productive) method of pimping my website and artwork will receive a free 8x10 of your choosing (or similar size - I believe some of my prints are odd sizes).

Doggies wearing t-shirts with my URL on it. Forcing your spawn to go up to strangers and ask if they've seen my website yet. Permanent marker on your cleavage. Any place you can stick my web address (classicwfl.com or hannibalartist.com - your choice).

How do you prove it? Videos, pictures, whatever. If it is a video, put it on YouTube and make sure my web address is in the description for an added boost. Pictures? Use Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, anything and everything to cross link back to my website.

If I get too may really good submissions, I'll reduce prices to $1 above the base cost for any single print of choice for the top 5 submissions - permanently (or until I forget why the heck I put some of my best work up on DA for so cheap)

Thanks everybody. You've got until the end of May to get your submissions in, so hurry up! I'll remind you all periodically through MySpace, FB, etc.

-WFL
classicwfl.com
hannibalartist.com

Open Source Design Software Sucks

Well, it sucks for professional medias such as magazines and newspapers - especially in businesses that have to collaborate with other industry professionals to get the product out the door (such as printing companies).

Usability. Compatibility. Advanced controls. Proper format and color space support. Lets cover a few of the quick flaws of some of the major open source programs available for designers..

The GIMP's (3rd party) CMYK support just plain doesn't cut it. It's .jpg generation creates so many compression artifacts that it isn't worth using. Managing type and choosing typefaces is an incredible hassle.

Scribus hasn't seemed to figure out that having a handy type dialog would be useful - not that it gives you many options in adjusting type, however.

InkScape's PDF generation and type control both are horrid.

This is a precursor to a set of reviews of all of the aforementioned programs. I will be comparing each to Adobe's Creative Suite line of software, listing in detail where the major flaws are that prevent each from being usable in the majors (or even at a tiny newspaper).

-WFL

Management: Trust your Experts

I'm writing this blog with the hope that managers (present and future) looking for help doing management will find this article and apply it to their standard management principles.

I also made sure to write that opening paragraph to give the SEO a little boost regarding the topic.

The simple synopsis for those of you who don't have the time to read the entire blog is this: The specialized employees you have (especially those in tech related fields) are there because hopefully, they know what they are doing. Because of this, you should defer to them for decisions regarding technical questions within their field, rather than choose yourself. At the very least, let them present you with a narrowed list of options.

Want to hear more about the how and why? Read on.

A simple and probable scenario: You have a product that has very specific goals in development, such as being usable for a certain age group, or is expandable. You've got a staff (one to one-hundred people, it doesn't matter) who are specialists in the product's field. You yourself have experience managing said staff in developing similar products, but you have little to no recent experience in the development field. When developing the timeline and in-between goals for reaching the primary goals (such as when certain points of functionality should be reached, or what approach you should take in the manufacturing process), do you rely on your own experience and intuition, or the developers?

If you answered the former, then you need to reconsider, because there is a strong chance that development will suffer. Why?

You yourself haven't had the chance to actually learn the nuances and potential pitfalls of the development process, which should change regularly in most fields. I myself work in the web, technology, security, and newspaper industries. I have personally had the joy of seeing decisions being made that have a profound effect on the end goals (driving traffic to a website, reducing cost, building revenue, etc) without having been consulted first. Many times, in fact.

You may argue that observation of the process is enough to learn, but unless you are micromanaging it from start to finish, you will miss critical details that leave you with much less experience than the people you hired - the experts.

Real world case in point: A major website owner decides to sell front-page interstitial web ads. These will show up before any content on the website does, and requires a click-through to move on to the real main page of the site. These will load only once per day per user (through use of cookies). We'll assume the website owner is charging through the nose for this sort of ad, which is why they were so eager to allow it.

The problem with the above scenario? Aside from the experts not being consulted before the sale, there is one critical problem - this will not only annoy users, but also dramatically impact search engine optimization, because of how the ad will load in the system.

Those of us who are experts in the web industry knows that if a search engine isn't getting your perfectly crafted landing page when indexing your site, it isn't going to return as many visitors to your site for your market. That means fewer impressions, which means less potential revenue for yourself and your other advertisers.

I understand being in a leadership/managerial position is difficult. You've got to forge relationships and earn the trust of your team, exploiting that to reach an end goal. There is a reason there are so many books on the topic - there is a need for expert opinions on being a leader.

Hopefully, after reading this, you'll look to your experts for more decisions regarding your next project. Remember, you are paying them to do what they are well-trained to do - which means you shouldn't have to feign expertise to do their job for them. If they aren't able to produce results for you in critical decisions, then you should consider investing in some training, or investing in some new experts.

For those of you who believe that I'm just another young sprite with no leadership experience singing the song of the expert in the managerial field, rest at ease; I've lead a number of tech related projects and worked with teams of specialists in order to reach a goal, ranging from managing online communities to leading a class through Linux installs and WAN simulations, and am an independent new media consultant. I may not be your next CIO, but I've at least witnessed the playing field from both ends, and would like to share my personal experiences with you in order to ensure that your business gets everything done the way it should be. Plus, I read "InformationWeek", so that makes me totally awesome.

-WFL

Link Discussion: "On Choosing Type"

If you've gotten down with my del.icio.us, you'd know that I just recently tagged another typography article; "On Choosing Type". I was so stoked about the easily supplemental nature of this article for anybody using type, I decided to write a short blog promoting the link.

This short, example-friendly article gives the reader a good number of suggestions regarding type. Suggestions that are fundamentally true in many applications of typography in the real world.

You NEED to read this article. I can't stress that enough. If you have no formal typographical/design training, this should be the first thing you read before you start another project.

-WFL

(PS: Expect a writeup on the DOA series in the near future)