I’m not against anyone learning new things. I think everyone should. But when you are a professional or small business, and you need a web site, think twice before you roll up your sleeves and attempt to do it yourself.
Our clients run the gamut from hard core geeks who maintain their own sites without incident once we hand them the keys to Internet neophytes who have us add every bit of new content. The secret is to know when you don’t know. If you haven’t a clue about web design, are colorblind, have no sense of style, no inkling about typography and the kind of messages that it and colors can send, if you think that PHP, HTML, CSS and SEO are all just so much alphabet soup, then think before you leap into web design. You might be able to save a few bucks in the beginning, but if you are counting on your shiny new web site to bring you business or income, then that could be a very costly mistake. Penny-wise and pound-foolish, anyone?
I stumbled across this article over the weekend and it sent me straight into orbit. Why? Well, this for one thing:
I’ve received increasing numbers of inquiries concerning Web site creation. Some are from … those who want to expand their business presence to an online audience.
Just like with any other line of work (medicine, law, teaching), you don’t just suddenly wake up one morning and DECIDE to become a web designer (or doctor, lawyer or teacher). In some cases, it requires years of academic study and/or a license. In all cases, it requires a thorough knowledge of the craft and that CANNOT be achieved in weeks or months of study, no matter how brilliant you are. I think this article devalues professional web designers such as ourselves and sends the message that anyone can buy a copy of Dreamweaver (or Xara Web Designer) or set up an account at Wix or Weebly and be on his or her way. That’s simply not the case.
I downloaded a trial version of Xara just to see what all the fuss was about. Sure it creates semantically correct code, but each paragraph has inline CSS styling for crying out loud. Now a professional web designer would know not to write bloated and redundant code like that, would know to use an external stylesheet rather than inline styles. Would a newbie? Likely not.
The author then goes on to posit this horrendous scenario:
If you import a huge .TIF file weighing in at 10 MB, for instance, Xara doesn’t even break a sweat as you expand it tenfold or move it around the page.
Jesus please us! What is a 10 megabyte image file doing on a web page anyway? The fact that you can do something doesn’t always mean you should. Knowing how to operate a program like this does not a web designer make. {{bangs head on desk}}
Xara Web Designer’s shortcomings notwithstanding, there are a lot of other faults I found with this article and its cavalier treatment of web design. The author does say that a fundamental knowledge of HTML and CSS are required, but he doesn’t say (and a neophyte might not realize) that CSS is constantly evolving, browsers are inconsistent at best in their rendering of CSS and many hacks and tricks are required (and the knowledge of how and when to use them) to get pages to render properly, look good, validate and be accessible. Xara (or Dreamweaver for that matter) isn’t going to help you there.
If you are counting on your web site to bring in business, to make income, or otherwise drive traffic to your site for whatever reason, the design has to be carefully thought out. You must have specific goals in mind for your site’s visitors, you must know who your target audience is and how to capture that audience’s attention. You have to know how design elements — colors, typography and graphic elements — tie together to create a memorable and compelling user experience. So unless you’ve got years of experience creating web sites, then you really should go ahead and hire a professional, and then sit back and let them create your perfect web site. That frees you to help your web designers in more efficient ways. Make sure they know what your business is about, who your competitors are, prepare your content, hire an outside SEO/SEM expert if you think you need to and if your web design shop doesn’t offer this service. Your business, your reputation, your future, are too important to be left to chance, to amateurs or to weekend web designer wannabes, won’t you agree?
P.S. And if you really are hell-bent on doing it yourself, rather than hiring a professional web design firm, then I highly recommend that you invest not only in a handful of good web design and CSS books, but grab yourself a copy of TopStyle Pro and EditPlus. 🙂
Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.
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