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Silky

Silky

Free Member
Oct 29, 2007
1,170
210
Stockport
Hi...
I hope someone could advise. My partner and I are starting a new internet based basis and a graphic designer has designed a fantastic page for us which a "web specialist" is now making "real". Basically he's just giving us one page with an active menu and then a replica of this page with a scroll bar and my partner's building on it from there.

What he's come back with so far is disappointing. The page will not self adjust at all - it's HUGE on my work pc and far too small on my laptop. He can't seem to get the menu (which shows one sub menu at a time) into the right place, on the latest rendition it was even in a border.

What I'd like to know from Those That Know is, am I asking for something unreasonable in wanting a page to self adjust and a menu that doesn't go off the page? The "specialist" (!) seems to be finding any excuse for what he's presenting me and I suspect he's actually not as experienced as he'd have me believe. He's blinding me with science at the moment under the premise of "if you can't convince them, confuse them!", I just thought I'd canvas opinion on this before deciding how best to proceed on this.

It's also taken 3 weeks now to translate a not very complicated design into one page - is this normal? These delays are now costing us money in lost business and I'm getting quite anxious that we're not getting any closer to a reasonable solution.

All advice gratefully received !!!

Silky
 
It's late! (last post before bed!).

I'm more of a designer, not a website 'coder', but I do have the ability to create "nice sites"....

Short answer to your question is:

No, it's not too difficult.. especially if he's a "specialist".

Is the website just basic html? or php / asp etc?

3 weeks too... isn't too good, considering he only had to 'code' the web PAGE.


I'm sure more experience webdesigner / developers will be along shortly to offer better advice :)

Good luck with it!
 
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Hey Silky,

Why don't you send me the graphic design along with as much info as you have given your "specialist". I will have it built, coded and fully functional in under 1 week - in HTML formal - based on what you have posted.

A good web coder will make the website compatible with all the common pc setups. If you are experiencing massive differences between home and work pc then you must specify the resolution for each. Are you using firefox or internet explorer?

Thanks

Kay
Calibre Designs
[email protected]
 
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Silky said:
am I asking for something unreasonable in wanting a page to self adjust and a menu that doesn't go off the page?
Click to expand...

No, you're not. That's just best practice.

For examples of exquisite design that conform to best practice, see www.csszengarden.com.

<rant>People who create web designs like that are masters of their profession. Unfortunately, many trained monkeys who can click a few buttons on Frontpage claim to be 'web designers'. Buyer beware.</rant>
 
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MikeUnwalla said:
No, you're not. That's just best practice.

For examples of exquisite design that conform to best practice, see www.csszengarden.com.

<rant>People who create web designs like that are masters of their profession. Unfortunately, many trained monkeys who can click a few buttons on Frontpage claim to be 'web designers'. Buyer beware.</rant>
Click to expand...

Thats the kind I am also getting fed up with.... but everyone had to start somewhere, I dont have a problem if they are trying to improove themselves :)
 
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I don't wish to defend the person in question but everyone is replying without having seen the design?

There's no excuse for blinding with science granted but perhaps if we saw the design somewhere (jpg) or indeed what you have so far as a semi functioning site then we can actually comment on something tangable.

I'm surprised none of you who have leaped in to assist have pointed that out.
 
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Your graphic designer has produced a graphic design. A web designer produces a web design. They are both very different animals. A graphic designer has a blank canvas to work from, they are given carte blanche, no rules or constraints. A web designer has to produce something that lies within the rules and constraints dictated by the web medium. As such there can be situations where problems occur, for example if the graphic designer has produced a design without knowing about or keeping in mind the rules and constraints of the web medium, e.g. if they mainly design for the print medium or if they have produced a design that is unlike and has nothing in common with any other website out there (which isn't a good idea anyway from a user interface perspective).

Here are just a few examples of rules and constraints of the web design medium which just aren't there in the graphic design medium:

1. Generally a web design (HTML/XHTML/CSS) consists of text and images that are laid out according to the rules (features and costraints) of HTML/XHTML/CSS. A graphic design is just a picture, and the only rules of layout with a picture are the numbers of pixels wide, numbers of pixels high, and colours of each pixel - apart from that anything goes.

2. Web design text is generally not antialiased, because it relies on the screen font technology used by the operating system (which in most cases isn't antialiased) so text that looks great in a graphic design because it is antialiased into a graphic bitmap, might look very poor as text in a web design (e.g. very small or large text). Since Mac fonts are antialiased, a graphic designer who uses a Mac all the time, might not even be aware of the fact that PC fonts are not antialiased. Sometimes the way around this is to use images instead of text, but this can cause problems with download times (making the page load slower) and preventing text flow.

3. A web design uses screen display resolutions, e.g. 72 or 96 dpi (dots per inch) resolution. If the graphic designer has designed for the print medium, 300 or 600 dpi then there will be problems translating the graphic design to web design. You can usually notice this problem if the graphic design has too much small text in it, text that would be perfectly readable in high resolution print, but impossible to read on screen. This might happen if your graphic designer spends most of their days designing pages for print.

4. Fonts. With a graphic design, any font can be used. With a web design, for areas that are supposed to be text, only certain fonts (the common web fonts that are available on most people's PCs) should be used.

5. With web design, text has certain text flow features laid out by what is possible with HTML/XHTML/CSS - in a graphic design there are no text flow limitations - text could go off in curves, waves, squeeze, stretch etc.

6. With web design, there are further limitations in how page layout is handled, how columns are designed, how text flows from one column to another, how text wraps around images (mainly rectangular images). With a graphic design you can place anything in your picture.

7. With web design there is image optimisation to consider, with graphic design you don't have to worry about this. Some images optimise better than others, and a graphic designer with an understanding of this would bear it in mind.

8. A graphic design doesn't have to stretch and rearrange itself for different content, a differently sized image in the content, titles or paragraphs that are bigger or smaller than the last one. With a graphic design, the content inside it has usually been trimmed to make the overall design nice, a web design doesn't have this luxury it must use real world content and in the real world everything comes in different shapes and sizes.

9. A graphic design doesn't have to stretch and rearrange itself to different browser window sizes, but depending on what type of web design you choose, if you choose a stretchable one then a web design has to cope with this too.

10. A graphic design, or a picture, looks the same on any platform, any browser. A lot of work has to be put in to make a web design appear similar on different platforms and different browsers.

In the past, I have been handed graphic designs from customers that have included most of the above issues. In these situations, more often than not it is the graphic designer that comes out smelling of roses, because they are the 'yes' people, saying 'yes' to a client, saying anything is possible (and it is within a graphic design medium). It is the web designer who ends up being the 'no' person, saying either 'that is not possible', or 'that is prohibitively expensive to develop', or 'that is not good for search engine friendliness or search engine optimisation' because they are the ones with the rules and constraints to work within.

Overall, there are a lot of things that can go wrong in translating a graphic design to a web design. You can minimise these risks by choosing a graphic designer who understands the web medium. Better still, rather than having 2 suppliers, choose one supplier who takes responsibility for the overall final website (and possibly outsources and takes responsibility for the other part). That way you are more likely to find a team who have worked together before and who understand each other's medium, and if not, then they will absorb the resulting overrun cost within their fixed price quote.
 
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As others have mentioned its hard to make a full response without seeing the work. Essentially though the designer is there as a solution however for you this so called specialist appears to be the problem.

This specialist should work to the design brief that you have specified and also take on board all or any comments/suggestions you have. In terms of elements falling off the page (horizontally i presume) then this is definately something that should be resolved.

At the end of the day, you are the client, he is the service provider. If he can't do the job, then he shouldn't have the job.
 
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Sounds like your developer isn't sticking to conventions and isn't looking at cross-browser compatibility or reviewing the site at different resolutions. For example, we still develop on the basis of the business standard 800 x 600 resolution. It's not good practice to hi-jack the end users browser and force the manner in which the page is presented. Menu positioning problems are probably caused by bugs in IE - particularly IE 6 which is very broken. If your developer knows what he's doing he should be reviewing what he's developing with Opera which is the most CSS compliant and then checking and bug fixing for IE (6 & 7 as 7 still has some indiosyncrasies), Firefox and Safari (does anyone still check for text browser (i.e. Lynx) compatibility?)
 
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"business standard 800 x 600 resolution."

is it? surely business standard these days is 1024x768 at the very least.
 
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Strange as it may seem 800 x 600 is still considered the accepted standard - although some software developers have abandoned it. We went 1024 x 768 with one Windows app until we had grumbles from a client about having to mess around with scroll bars - over 50% of their PC's (new machines) were set to 800 x 600.
 
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People have to accept that technology moves on and so should they -floppy disks are a good example.

We do not and will not (unless specifically asked to) produce sites that will fit without scroll on 800x600 (then you have to fight with all the various tool bars, bookmarks, history etc) - don't care what anyone says it's just a waste of time and restrictive to the majority benefiting from larger resultions. (*running and hiding as prepared to be shot down*). I'm quite sure that if you get to the nitty gritty of most webbies out there don't either if asked.

I assume someone corrected your clients screens as that is a one off occurance and not the norm.
 
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Nope - we re-wrote - people using 800 X 600 preferred the larger font sizes and wanted this in preference to a crisp and uncluttered interface!
 
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Regardless of whether the common PC desktop is now 800x600 or 1024x768 or higher - in fact 800x600 is less common nowadays - there are still other reasons to design for 800x600.

1. Not everybody has their browser window maximised, some people prefer to run it in a window so they can see other desktop elements - after all it is a windows desktop operating system (and they are paying good money to Bill Gates for this feature)

2. Others might have other elements on screen or in browser (e.g. favourites column, search column ) which reduces available screen width

3. Generally, having wide columns of text makes it difficult to read the text, as the eye has to travel further from the end of the right line to the beginning of the next left line - which is why newspapers have columns. If you just make your text lines wider, without introducing columns, you will make the text more difficult to read

4. Although desktop PCs are getting higher resolution and they are the main way of browsing the net at the moment, this does not mean that will always be the case. There are already important inroads being made with alternative browsing technologies, e.g. mobiles phones getting better (and they have some catching up to do resolution wise, e.g. XDA aren't quite up to displaying 800 wide websites yet), Nokia 770 internet tablet is 800 wide, nintendo wii allows you to browse the web on your TV with its internet channel (which has the Opera browser with flash) and 800 wide is a good choice for this particular platform. So keeping a web design which supports 800x600 (whether fixed or elastic) doesn't necessarily give you a legacy web design, it can give you a more future proof web design.

A lot can be down to personal taste, a lot can be down to what you are used to (the designs of the websites you frequent), and a lot can be down to weighing up all available pros and cons. That is why you get different people saying different things, and different websites adopting different types of designs. Some go for the fixed 800 wide design, e.g. bbc.co.uk, lastminute.com (only ads go over the 800 mark), and most of our sitebuilder web designs. Equally, others go for elastic designs but still managing to squeeze down to 800 wide, e.g. amazon.co.uk, google.co.uk. There are also those sites that forego 800 wide and have fixed 1024 wide design, e.g. microsoft.com new home page. There are others that mix and match, e.g. ebay.co.uk has a fixed 800 wide home page, and elastic other pages that don't always shrink down to 800!
 
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Hi

They have taken 3 weeks, you give us a outline of what you want and we will have it ready in 3-5 day's max and the best bit you don't pay a penny until your happy!
 
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awebapart.com said:
4. Although desktop PCs are getting higher resolution and they are the main way of browsing the net at the moment, this does not mean that will always be the case. There are already important inroads being made with alternative browsing technologies, e.g. mobiles phones getting better (and they have some catching up to do resolution wise, e.g. XDA aren't quite up to displaying 800 wide websites yet), Nokia 770 internet tablet is 800 wide, nintendo wii allows you to browse the web on your TV with its internet channel (which has the Opera browser with flash) and 800 wide is a good choice for this particular platform. So keeping a web design which supports 800x600 (whether fixed or elastic) doesn't necessarily give you a legacy web design, it can give you a more future proof web design.
Click to expand...

Why would you provide the same stylesheet to all these different mediums?
 
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AlphOmega said:
Why would you provide the same stylesheet to all these different mediums?
Click to expand...
We're mainly talking about different width resolutions here. These mediums mainly have different width resolutions, the browser capabilities are getting similar to desktops (e.g. Nintendo Wii with Opera 9 and Flash). Do you provide different stylesheets to desktop browsers depending on their different width resolutions or the current width the user has resized the browser window to? In most cases no (but if you do, then I guess you should continue this practice).

However, there might be other reasons apart from width resolutions why you might introduce different stylesheets for these other mediums in the future, e.g. to improve the user experience depending on the user input device for a given medium.
 
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Wow! Thanks everyone for your input on this!

I've spent the last few days battling further on this, I understand the points made about translating graphic design to web design, but the web guy saw the graphics and our brief before accepting the work. He's charging us £300 for one page (with a scrolled and an none-scroll version) and we're now into the 4th week and it's not complete. As we've about another 50 pages to then build behind this it's starting to become a joke.

The problem I found in searching for someone to do this work is that it's sooo hard to differentiate the wheat from the chaff when looking for a web designer, and funnily enough, some of the best designers have great sites but have spent little time on search engine optimisation and their sites don't even appear in the first 10 pages of a search. As someone's also mentioned, armed with a mac and a software manual many people think that qualifies them to be called a "designer" or "web specialist". GRRRR !!

We're nearly there on the page, but only because my partner has had to work out how to resolve some of the issues the web guy can't (something we wanted to avoid).

Definitely a case of "buyer beware" I guess, I can see there's going to be fun and games when the "web specialist" eventually gives us his invoice....

I did think it interesting though that even amongst Those That Know, there is still a debate on which screen resolution you design to!

Thanks everyone for your comments on this,
Silky
 
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glad you are getting things sorted!! Good Luck!!

(50.33% of my visitors use: 1024x768... the next nearest is 15.67% using: 1280x1024)
 
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Silky said:
I did think it interesting though that even amongst Those That Know, there is still a debate on which screen resolution you design to!
Click to expand...

I've just bought a lovely 22" widescreen monitor - so you can have it designed as wide as you like for me ;)

I think taking this exercise (and designer) as a good learning lesson - £300 for just 1 page is rather steep considering you or a collegue has apparently had to do so much and the work has taken so long to complete. I'd suggest allowing him to complete this section and then looking at someone else to do any further or future work... try and get some recommendations; if your unsure you could always ask for examples of their work and then email their client to actually ask how good they were and how well they listened and followed feedback!
 
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I'd still love to see what this guy has done - silky once (if) he finishes provide us with a url, then we can really get our claws in!!! ;)

If theres plenty of td's me thinks Phil's css layout fee idea might go out the window...
 
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flamin fingers:

This is over the last 15 days:

800x600 = 1.33%

60.91% use IE6.0 (but thats out of all the resolutions)


I dont have stats for Browser & resolution
 
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Quite a few of our sites are pretty much one page - with the content for every other 'page' pulled off a database including whatever stylesheet (as a variable) the 'page' needs to use. If this is what your designer is aiming at £300 is not that expensive - getting the design right can be time consuming particularly if your sourcing photos etc.
 
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Browser stats for a site over 30 days (21,920 visitors - 12,272 absolute unique visitors)

Internet Explorer 19,790
Firefox 1,648
Safari 345
Mozilla 53
Opera 45
Netscape 13
GZip 9
Playstation Portable 4
Camino 3
Mozilla Compatible Agent 2

Screen Res:

1024x768 11,938
1280x1024 3,996
1280x800 2,203
800x600 1,047
1152x864 626
1440x900 616
1680x1050 466
1280x768 244
1400x1050 178
1280x960 119
 
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DavidRyves said:
Quite a few of our sites are pretty much one page - with the content for every other 'page' pulled off a database including whatever stylesheet (as a variable) the 'page' needs to use. If this is what your designer is aiming at £300 is not that expensive - getting the design right can be time consuming particularly if your sourcing photos etc.
Click to expand...

Although if he is aiming for £300 per page and with 50 pages still to go... thats a whopping great £15,000 :D :eek:

Ultimately there just isn't enough info to make a definative comment - it could go either way...
 
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Looking a Gavin's stats I think older versions of Opera reported themselves as being IE - I'm sure Opera has a bigger share of the market than the stats would make you think.
 
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If someone can explain how to add an image on here I'll post a piccie of the front page as designed by our graphics man - I'm wary of posting a link to the testsite as I don't want webman to see any traffic...

The image is on a file on my hard disk.....erm, help please?! :|

Thanks!
Silky
 
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If someone can explain how to add an image on here I'll post a piccie of the front page as designed by our graphics man - I'm wary of posting a link to the testsite as I don't want webman to see any traffic...

The image is on a file on my hard disk.....erm, help please?! :|

Thanks!
Silky
 
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Ok, here goes...

.http://www.kodakgallery.co.uk/I.jsp?c=4fmw1bxp.1hw28gw19&x=0&y=-4q6qlx

It's not particularly clear from this, but you can see the layout and graphics. There's a fair bit of graphical content on the background , a menu with subs on the left hand side, on the top horizontal bar and 3 picture menus.

Up until now Webman has given us a page with a menu that jumps out of the box if a different size screen is used, a page that doesn't resize and a scroll bar that also wanders across the page according to the resolution. Only the side menu is currently "active".

One issue mentioned by Webman is that the banner won't resize if the site is self adjusting. Someone else has mentioned a "scaling image", is this a way around this? I'm starting to get the impression he's now putting obstacles in my way just to try and bully me into accepting any old rubbish that he can pull together quickly . Call me a cynic.....

Once this first page is set up, my partner is using this as a template for future pages, amending them to suit the theme.

Why do I feel plaiting fog would be easier at times...?

Silky

 
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At first glance it does look like he's been given a fixed width design to work from and you wanted a flexible width design. Your designer not the web guy needs to resolve this as it's the designer who should decide the look and feel and what happens to the design in a flexy situation.

d
 
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