I'm using a new graphics designer and he is really good, but he has never made a webpage. The only thing he is going to do is make a PSD files Then I'm going to hand it over to someone who is very good at hand coding HTML/CSS. I guess "responsive" is the trendy word now. What advice should I give the designer to make the job easier or better for the HTML/CSS guy? My first thought would be go light on images. 2nd thought is figure out some navigation that would work well on a phone and in a full browser (That is where I'm a little confused). This isn't going to be a complicated website. I've haven't done web stuff in a while. Which HTML version would be best all around. Is it premature to do HTML 5/CSS 3? Thanks for any input.
No, it isn't. I leverage HTML5/CSS3 ever since it is being drafted and I'm fine so far, and my work is extremely complicated. For image, don't worry too much. You give the job to a coder who know how to compress it to a minimum size while preserved quality, which is hard to come by. You hesitate to use modern technology and you will be left behind the hunting pack, unless that isn't an issue. For the design, I've no idea I mostly borrowed from the other people's
Responsive isn't "trendy", though it is being thrown about as a sick buzzword it's one of the few that has actual substance behind it... It is simply the next logical step in accessible design after CONTENT FIRST, semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, progressive enhancement, and semi-fluid elastic layout. Unfortunately all those GOOD development methods mean you've pretty much already screwed the pooch by bringing in a "designer" -- particularly one who knows jack **** about what a website is or what it requires. Generally speaking those should be the people you bring in to do a paintover AFTER you have a working site, NOT someone you start out letting piss out PSD's any-old-way in total ignorance. ANYONE telling you to start out worrying about what it looks like before you have semantic markup of your content (or a reasonable facsimile of future content) doesn't know enough about websites to be designing but two things for the Internet. It's also why off the shelf templates from scam artist whorehouses like TemplateMonster or ThemeForest are utter and complete rubbish. Take your content, put it in a flat text editor in a logical order as if HTML never even existed, then mark it up (add HTML) saying what thigns ARE, NOT what they look like (if you choose your HTML tags based on what they look like by default, you are choosing all the wrong tags for all the wrong reasons!) -- then use CSS to create the layoutS from that single markup adding any semantically neutral HTML (DIV and SPAN) as needed. Then and only then do you bring in the art guy to make graphics to hang on the layout -- if any. (thanks CSS3!) Anything else is most always a broken, bloated, slow inaccessible train wreck that is more about stroking the designers... ego (I'll say ego, I mean something else) than it is about delivering your content to users in a clean, accessible, functional manner. It's why 99%+ of websites that have some "designer" involved are useless trash, no matter how pretty they are! *** NOTE *** I come from a graphics background, this was all a very bitter pill for me to swallow when I did finally "get it" over a decade ago. As the saying goes "The web is not print" -- but really it runs deeper than that. Take a look at the major success stories of the Internet -- Facebook, Twitter, Google, E-Bay, Amazon, Craigslist -- do those REALLY look like they have some graphic artist spanking it on the screen in Photoshop involved? They have content of value presented to the user clean, you could do far worse than to follow their example. Hell, Craigslist is so fugly it makes -- to borrow from Larry the Cable Guy -- most artists peeper shrink in so far it shoots out their pooper. ... and don't get me started about the bleeding edge of 1990's coding practices that is the train wreck of stupidity known as HTML 5. The ONLY reason to use it is if you REALLY need to use one of the tags being shoved down our throats (VIDEO, AUDIO) by Apple being a bunch of jackasses to people dumb enough to "buy" their products. Of course if you ask Apple you didn't buy the product, you're renting the "experience".
Thanks man. Actually, I'm not a bad coder (It's just hard for me to consider HTML/CSS "code" ). I used to know the xhtml specs fairly well, but it's been a while. I generally agree with you on technology, but now that I'm on the business side I have to be a little more careful.
Just to add. If you use svg images, use this tool to minimize it: https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/
I have my doubts on that the moment you said you had a graphics designer who doesn't know websites involved. You will NEED to watch them like a hawk and your developer writing the HTML and CSS is going to need the authority to tell them No, NO, NO and possible even the occasional "OH **** NO you ignorant twit!" since concepts like scalable dimensions, sliding door graphics and multiple layouts will be complete unknowns -- which is why layouts (yes, plural) should be done BEFORE the PSD jockey is allowed anywhere near it. I used the word twit, I meant a similar word with a different vowel. Is that page supposed to do something? Only thing that seems to do anything is the "about" link to the github page. Does a very nice job of hemorrhaging scripting errors though.