Your choice of technology should depend
both on the type of site you want to create and the kind of approach that will
suit your mentality. Avoid fighting the tide.
Sites can be ‘static’, with fixed HTML
pages to structure content and associated CSS for styles, along with linked
documents like images; or ‘dynamic’, with pages pieced together from components
such as headers, footers and side bars. Dynamic sites rely on a data base of
content on your server, usually handled by a content management system (CMS).
If such terms strike terror into your heart, be assured that modern CMSs such
as WordPress present a very straight forward interface that largely conceals
the complexities of data base management, at least for modest sites.
Responsive
sites adjust their layouts appropriately for the user’s viewport
Another option, and one that’s increasingly
spreading from low-end consumer use into professional practice, is working with
a customizable hosted platform. For example, social blogging service Tumblr
(tumblr.com) is great for short-form text posts and streams of images and can
have new themes applied to make each site unique. You can get up and running
very quickly, you don’t have to worry about server issues because everything is
handled by the service, and you can associate your own domain name (such as
thisnameijustbought.com) with your site so that visitors aren’t necessarily
aware that it’s anything but an independent entity.
‘It’s not about cheating, just making the
most of your time,’ reckons designer, speaker and author Elliot Jay Stocks
(elliotjaystocks.com). Offloading aspects of design and content management to
third-party systems can make a lot of practical sense. ‘There are many great
services out there that save you having to reinvent the wheel. So take
advantage of what other shave done and stand on the shoulders of giants, as it
were – but try and understand what’s going on under the hood, too.’
That last point is important. Without
knowing at least the key aspects of how a system works, you’ll come unstuck
when you need to depart from the way it looks and behaves by default. For a
personal site, a vanilla theme on a blogging network might be fine, but most projects
will demand more.
Note that making good use of others’ work
doesn’t mean taking it without permission. It’s all too easy to copy and paste
code from the source of existing websites, but copyright applies just like
anywhere else, both to the code and to the structure and graphics that make up
a site’s appearance, as well as to content such as images and text. Do pinch
ideas, but don’t lift designs, unless they’re explicitly offered for free use
by their creators. There are plenty of great free themes around, but watch out
for rogue sites that offer ‘free everything’ and rip off content from elsewhere
on the web; you’ll be liable for any infringement.
WordPress,
a hugely popular CMS, lets you pick a theme and go, buy premium themes and
frameworks from third parties, or code your own HTML, CSS and PHP, or any
combination of the above
A service that offers a great balance of
accessibility and flexibility is WordPress, which is easy to get to grips with
yet is being used to power even very ambitious sites. ‘It’s amazing what can be
achieved quite in the browser, and understanding how gradients can be used with
repeating content is one of the rookie mistakes I see over and over again.’
Mist takes up the theme: ‘Apart from
getting used to pixels over points, print designers must learn to make
allowances for how those pixels are rendered and the quality of their
appearance. The mix of browsers and operating systems can throw up varying
results in the rendering of type, especially with web fonts. Print designers
will have to get used to testing fonts across platforms to make sure they’re
happy with the results.’
Anyone who surfs a lot of cutting-edge
sites at the moment will notice that while more distinctive typography is
quickly emerging, the quality of the results varies conspicuously. Creative
decisions won’t over-come problems like choosing a badly hinted font that
renders poorly in the browser, or picking a font display solution that doesn’t
work equally well across platforms.
As Woods notes, designing pages can’t be
separated from designing interactions. ‘Print is a one-way relationship
regarding the delivery and consumption of content, but prototyping and
wireframing is important for the web. Sites are in a constant process of
evolution, changing based on user behaviors and feedback. Think of Facebook as
an example: it’s constantly pushing out new iterations and improving the user
experience, often in small, subtle ways.’
On the other hand, Boulton, as a former
predominantly print-based designer, argues that it’s important not get too
hooked up on technology and output, but to focus on the design problem. The
evolution of the web means designers previously immersed in more traditional
fields shouldn’t feel adrift; in fact, they increasingly have skills that are
extremely useful for web design, while web specialists can find their more
technical skills rapidly overtaken by progress.
By way of example, Mist explains that the
landscape for online type has dramatically changed over the past couple of
years: ‘Until recently, setting type online was limiting, with editable text
restricted to a handful of “web safe” fonts. Now, services like Typekit provide
many more to play with, and you need the skills for balancing and setting
type.’ Controls are coarser than those in print layout apps such as Adobe
InDesign and QuarkXPress, but there’s still scope for strong, detailed
typographic design. ‘Leading, measure, contrast, pairing, hierarchy – all of
this is perfectly possible with CSS,’ confirms Boulton. ‘The web is finally a
place where you can use the typefaces most appropriate for any given project.’
Web
font services such as Adobe’s Typekit make it easy to use a range of typefaces
in your sites
As Mist notes: ‘These are things print
designers should excel at, and in fact may well do better than web designers,
many of whom have come from a technical back-ground rather than design.’ Woods
adds that although online grids for future-proof sites require more flexibility
than print equivalents, even here those well-versed in ‘traditional’ design
disciplines have an advantage: ‘In my opinion, there has never been a better
and more exciting time to move from print to digital design.’
