Record as I Am

Tech && Soccer && PHP Coding - More Bolivian than America expected.

37signals lists 7 good reasons to avoid using Photoshop to create mockups for web sites or applications. I've found this practice utterly annoying for all the reasons that they mention but I don't see it going away soon. Sadly most "web designers", yes-that's an intentional set of quotes, are much more fluent in creating Photoshop files than they are workign in CSS and HTML.

Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

From reading "Design doing":

Speaking personally, all of my favourite web designers have one thing in common: they know how to write HTML and CSS

I'm still surprised by how little HTML + CSS many "web" designers actually know.

Shockingly, Web Designers should know how to design for the web, not just for Photoshop.  Its a point that was driven home during my recent trip to California for Forum One's (my employer) Online Community Summit. While I may not have done a comprehensive survey, I visited another web company there, and also met a number of folks who work in Silicon Valley.

Some people like fully justified text.  I guess it brings another layer of perceived order to an otherwise chaotic universe.  If you choose to implement it on a web page, be warned that legibility suffers due to the crude justification algorithms implemented in browsers.

Sandy found this gem, which probably applies to more professions than just Web Designers.  Working with clients such as these can be really trying, but what can you do to get through it?

Roger Johansson's post from 2005 is still as true today as it was then: A web professional can never stop learning.  Here it's 2007 and we're still dealing with designs that look best in photoshop, and my personal pet peeve - images for text headers (is there anything less useful?

Dealing with Internet Explorer is an unsavory part of developing web sites. You can't ignore it, and you want your sites design to look half decent on it with about half the effort that requires. Last time I tried to install IE6 to run under WINE, I completely failed.

I hate to do this to the CollegeSoccerNews.com, but the site is a perfect example of why you should not use images where text would be more appropriate. To me, this is usually a sign of a graphic designer coming from a print background who can't handle not having COMPLETE AND TOTAL control over their render page IN EVERY BROWSER KNOWN TO MAN. I also get the vibe that the site is more concerned with presentation than with their actual content.

Using images to replace text headers also creates a lot of unnecessary work, both at the beginning and down the road. If you ever need to update a header, or make one that matches, now you have to find the images, make sure you have installed on your PM the weird font the designer HAD to have. In the case of the navigation on this site, they also have to style their text to look like text links - blue with and underlined. By using text images, you've killed the accessibility of you site, unless your super diligent about your title and alt tags. You've also bloated how many bytes your visitors have to download. Oh, and finally, did I mention no search engine will be able to read the text in your images - hows that going to impact your Google ranking and traffic as a result?

So in Summary - text images are bad because:

• Unnecessary work to build and update your page = expensive to deploy and maintain
  
• Kills site accessibility = locking out potential users
  
• Bloats your page size = longer to download and render
  
• No one can find your page = you won't be high in search results