Web Design Training Blog

When starting to make a new web site, the first thing you should do is to get some pens and paper. Web sites are built on a computer but they are planned on a desk. Young and inexperienced web design students sit down at the keyboard and start making a web site with only a vague idea in their head as to what it is going to be. Websites do not begin life on at the keyboard.

Serious web designers begin with paper and they plan before they touch a keyboard.

The bigger the web site the more time needs to be spent in planning. If you are building a web site for a client, you have to carry the client with you all through the build phase. They have to be satisfied with what you are doing. I usually create a web address called “work in progress” and customers can actually watch the web site as it is being built.

The one thing I don’t want is to spend a lot of time working on a site and for the client to come back to me and say they don’t like what I have done and they want some major changes. That wastes time and decreases my profit margin.

Stages in planning a web site

Planning and styling – working on paper - work on paper to plan your site – use storyboards – do a rough page layout - think through the look and feel and try alternative colour schemes.

Site mapping and navigation - how many pages, what is each page called, what is it about.  Draw a site map (sometimes called a storyboard).  Each page is a box and the links between pages are drawn as arrows.  Set the title of the page and the file name. This helps when designing the navigation.

Creative design and colouring - reasons for choosing colour schemes, how many colours to use, what to use those colours for

Collecting and managing images - company logo, stock photos, product photos, pictures of staff

Preparing the text - getting draft copy from the client, desk editing text to make it suitable for the web, editing text for keyword density.

Creating a master file (sometimes called a template)

Create a master file from which all other pages in the web site will be copied. Make sure that the code, structure and layout are correct and that the style sheets are connected up. Use file save as to create each page. Make sure you use the correct format for file names. This is my protocol for file names: DO NOT put spaces into file names and use only lower case letters. Use underscores instead of spaces. These rules help to keep broken links down to a minimum. This applies both to web page filenames and to image file names.

Use FILE SAVEAS to make each new page. Check your navigational links in the browser to ensure that all the images work.

Create a project plan or check list to make sure you are completing each step of the build.

External style sheet created

• Document type is present on each page - check you have the correct DTD for the elements you are using.
  
• All styles are correct
• Styles are applied to appropriate elements
  
• Links in menu bars are checked and correct
• Alt statements set for all images
  
• Title tag set to generic statement - this will need to be modified for each page
  
• Codes has been checked for errors
• Copying (replicating) the master file to create the pages of the web site
• Testing the navigation
• Putting in the content
• Testing

Site finalisation checklist and quality control

Publication

Post-publication procedures

Testing - validation - robots txt file uploaded - favicon in place - submit site to ICRA for content rating.

Submission to search engines.

Most of my work is about either making or maintaining web sites for businesses or training in-house designers to do the same thing.

When I take a brief for a new site the very thing I ask the client is “what business are you in?” I start by understanding what the business does, who its clients or customers are and where they are located. I need to know this before we start talking about the web site.

A business web site is a way of taking a business to the outside world - to market. Whilst many businesses want to use their web site as a sales tool, some see its role as servicing existing customers. Occasionally you will be told that the site does not need to be found in search engines and it will not play a role in sales and marketing.

For the majority of sites, getting found on the web is mission critical. So all our work has search engine optimization built into it. This means knowing how to make a site that stands the best chance of getting into the top 10 organic results.

Often this means that certain things that a company would like to see on its web site will have to be dropped.  I often get asked to do things which are mutually exclusive!

If I get asked to make a web site that uses frames I just say “no”.

If I get asked to make a web site that starts with a cover page made entirely of Flash, I explain why this is a bad idea. I often get asked to remove a Flash cover page from a web site.

People see things on teh web and think “mmmm  that’s really cool”. How they managed to find some sites is a mystery - maybe they got there from a link on an equally bad site, but hey the web always has been like the ocean - some sites float on the top but a lot of stuff sinks to the bottom where it disappears into the sediment.

I ask myself this question:  what is all the web sites on the Internet were totally optimized for search engines?  Would we see the emergence of super optimisation?

Only a smallish proportion of the world’s web sites are actually in any search engines. Google provides a list of 10 for the standard search, though users can re-set this figure - I set my google search results to 50.

Business web sites need to do what the business wants from the Internet.  Business processes come first and everything should flow down from commercial goals.

When training web designers, the bit they have the most trouble with is always CSS. Or at least it takes the most time to explain.

Those who are using Dreamweaver get away with it because all they have to learn is how to work the CSS dialogue boxes.

It is however ome of the most powerful and flexible and time saving elements of web design.

There is however a lot of learn, particularly if the web designer really wants to unleash the full power of CSS driven web sites.

In this area of the blog I want to post some material about CSS that I hope will aid students to really get to grips with CSS.

The key to using CSS is to under what CSS does - what role it plays in the web site and how to organise style sheets to make them easy to use and edit.

I have been training people to make websites for well over 10 years. Well in fact the Internet in general and the WWW in particular had only really just got going when I became a web designer. Because I worked as a trainer and teacher for many years before the WWW was a day to day thing, it was natural for me to want to teach people how to make web sites.

Since then I have taught web design to many hundreds of people in all sorts of settings. I enjoy doing it.

I have taught people to make their first simple web page and I have coached company web site managers through the ins and outs of making and maintaining web sites and online shops.

I am still a jobbing web designer of course - having a portfolio of web sites to maintain and now this blog !

More and more my job is helping other businesses to get more out of the Internet - you could say I am more of a web consultant than a blog standard web designer.

This blog is somewhere to put my thoughts about those ten years of experience of teaching web design.

That might help others to do their training a tiny bit better; it might help people who are thinking about becoming web design trainers.

Let’s just see if we get any comments on here.

Do web designers make good trainers?

Generally no. But I was a trainer before the www was invented. I took my training experience and applied to the task of helping people to design web sites.

Training is about helping people to learn.  Training is different from teaching, though, of course, both activities share a lot in common.  In fact, some of what I now do is called “coaching”.  Coaching is rather like working with sports persons.  They are already good at what they do - running, jumping - and the task of the coach is to help them to develop their technique, to manage the preparation and planning for a big event (project) and to  evaluate their performance.

Coaching web designers (as I do it) involves looking at their skills and their knowledge and seeing where the strengths and weaknesses lie. Is the web designer a good all rounder or do they are deficiencies that can be worked on?

A coach will work with a web designer to help them review all aspects of their work. It might mean looking at how they work, what tools they use, the proficiency with with they use those tools and sometimes considering their “x factor”, what inpspires them, what holds them back or what motivates them.

more later

One of the things we are looking at is whether a blog can improve traffic to a web site.

There has been some discussion recently on blogs having good results in search engines. Linking a blog to a web site might help to drive traffic to it. Something that needs some research.

Blogs can also be linked to web sites - which might be good for their PR (popularity ranking - another search engine optimisation factor).

Will do some research into this and post results to this blog

Well this is not the purpose of blogs - they can be used for many different purposes including just having fun with your friends. But in commerce web work there are those who see them as being a useful tool in increasing rankings in search engines.

Simply speaking, blogs can provide links into the web site you are trying to optimise and can themselves get found and ranked in the search engines.

If your blog gets found then there is a good chance that blog readers will click on links to your web site.

Well that is the theory of it !!

In fact now that blogging has become so well established,  people are starting to write articles about how to write good blog material and how to manage a successful blog.

Its well possible that a blog will do better in search engines than a web site. This is true if entries are written on a daily basis.

Well, I have only just started this blog about web design training.  In a few months time I will know whether it gets more hits than my main web site (web workers kitchen).

Indeed, if that happens, then I will be able to see if our main web site begins to get more visitors going to it.

My visitor stats will show how many people went from the main web site into the blog and vice versa.

What would be great for our  web design training site  is getting loads of links into it from blogs all over the world.

The more links I get into WWK the more PR it will have in the search engines.

Let me point out however that its not just the quantity of inbound links that affects SEO and PR.

Most SEO experts talk about the quality of links and that is mainly about keyword relevance.

Hence, what I need to get is links from other blogs that are about either web design or training. Are there any other blogs about web design training? Well I can go onto the search engines and try to find that out.

More on search engine optimisation

Having installed the blog software on the web server and made a few posts to see if its working, I then started to get into using the various functions offered by the application - or at least beginning to find out how to use them.

The software - WordPress - has a help web site. I noticed a thing called a “blogroll” so I went on to the help site to see if I could find how what it was and how it would be configured and used.

After a bit of searching I found the section about Creating and Managing a Blogroll.

I found out that ” The blogroll is where you link to the blogs you read frequently - a friendly way of acknowledging the good blogs out there “.

The Blogroll lists links to other blogs. There is a page on the admin area where these links can be inserted. So I did a search for uk blogs on web design, found a new and added them in.

OH NO NOT SPAMMING!

I now find that blogs get spammed.  Complete idiots try to post their pathetic rubbish to my blog.  It will never get through.  Dont they understand this? Comments that are clearly spam just get marked as spam and deleted before they ever get published.  All that spammers do is to create more work for me to delete their miserable detritus.

If this sounds harsh, just count up the minutes of my time that are wasted every day deleting spam.

Bear in mind that it has been estimated that 80% of all e-mail traffic on teh Internet now is unwanted, unsolicited junk mail.

Who is paying for that?  People like me who are serious Internet users and whose time is being wasted by spammers.

Fortunately,  blogging packages have anti-spamming devices built in and block rubbish from being posted to serious blogs.  Comments are welcomed from serious users but have to be moderated before they are published.

This blog is part of the web site called Web Workers Kitchen. This web site was create to act as a resource centre for students and trainees of web design.

The blog offers a convenient way of introducing students to the concept of setting up and managing a blog. Blogging has become an easy and convenient way of posting content to the Internet.

This blog is moderated - which means that readers are welcome to submit comments but that comments are reviewed by the author before being published.

A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The term “blog” is a portmanteau of “Web log.” “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Source: Wikipedia

Blogging has become very popular. It allows content to be published to the Internet in a way that is much more immediate and flexible than publishing a web site.

A blog is something that can be frequently updated - almost like an online diary.

Items are added chronologically. Blogs are usually created by individuals and hence are more personal than most web sites.

Oneof the earliest bloggin web sites was blogger.com which still exists.

Blogs range from the serious to the ideosyncratic and trivial.

Blogs have become popular in the media as a way of disseminating news.

Weblogs Compendium has a page of definitions that is useful for beginners