Just an example

The website mentioned above is just an example of something we tend to do frequently: make the client sound stupid, like he or she will never understand the complexity of our work.

Oh, aren’t we clever?

No. We are not brighter than our clients. We are not more intelligent, like sometimes I’m led to believe if I listen to some conversations and to the constant moaning.

I was recently in a meeting with a client — a clever, intelligent person; he was asking us questions that we, as “people of the Web”, would have never considered. His questions reminded me of how much we take as common knowledge when talking to and designing to the general public.

This made me realise how sometimes we probably sound like obnoxious snobs, and how I should probably be even more careful than I already am when talking to someone that doesn’t work on the Web.

Lots of intelligent people just don’t understand the terms we use and are probably completely lost in some conversations and meetings. That won’t help us pass our points across.

Making an effort

But am I accusing the wrong side? Should clients simply make more of an effort to learn the jargon? After all, there is a learning curve for when someone starts working with a website. We all know too well that one of the biggest problems with the client/designer (I’m using this term very loosely here) relationship happens when the client has faulty expectations about the input that will be required from him or her during the process.

We too learn the jargon of others, out of necessity. Like when we go to the mechanic or something breaks around the house, and we have to talk to a technician, another professional. We understand that by having a car, we need to make the effort of knowing at least a little bit of how it works, so we don’t catch ourselves stranded in the middle of the night in a lonely road, helpless.

But that doesn’t mean I know what a mechanic is talking about when he’s going on and on about what’s wrong with my car. And I would probably be completely lost if I had to speak to a textile designer or an architect about their work. I just hope they explain it to me in a way I can understand and trust them to do their best work.

Respect

Sometimes people are just plain mean, or disrespectful. That is a completely different thing. Like in any other business, there are tough clients, tough people that we have to deal with. But not knowing that an online image is to be measured in pixels, shouldn’t make a client from Hell:

I need to know what size you need the graphics for the website. Is two? Maybe three inches good?

Or maybe we should make things clear in our terms of service and contracts:

“I thought your quote was for an unlimited time limit, I’m not finished with my changes and I don’t want to pay any extra!”

And, of course, sometimes people are just clueless:

I need to get moving, anyway you can do some work on this on your vacation. That’s a long vacation, I bet you’ll get bored anyway, and this is back-and-forth via email, not phone, so it shouldn’t cause you any stress.

Conclusion

I have no conclusion. I still haven’t found the secret to convey my work and my methods in a simple way. Even the words that sound the simpler to us strike me as sounding completely foreign during meetings (like JavaScript, HTML or CSS). But I’m sure as hell making a bigger effort of not being patronising, of putting myself on other people’s shoes, and trying to make things sound as clear as possible.

I feel most of the times, if we are facing a “client from Hell”, it’s our fault and we should do something to fix that.

And now I hope I don’t ever have to complain about a client again, or at least remember of not doing it in front of someone else. That would be most embarrassing.

The W3C Specifications: the closest we’ve got to a manual

Photo by foreversouls

For the past few months I have been reading the W3C specifications on CSS 2.1, CSS 3, HTML 4.01 and, more recently, HTML 5. My main reason was to be able to write more accurate posts here at Web Designer Notebook, but also for two articles that I wrote for Smashing Magazine (only one of them has been published so far, but the other one will be published within the next few days, hopefully and so has the second one).

The first reaction to the specs, when you know you have to read them, is a very big sigh, but after a while I realised they were actually quite easy to read and that they answered a lot of common daily questions: some things finally made sense!

I haven’t read them all, yet, but I should have, and so should all web designers, in my opinion. Why?, you may ask. Because it’s the closest thing we’ve got to a proper manual, a proper book that we are required to read at “school”.

I’m not saying we have to read every single bit (I guess the ones I mentioned previously are the most important ones), we don’t have to know them by heart, but they should be used as a reference, like any other professional book. After all, those specs lay the foundation of what we work on everyday, so we should at least have an overall knowledge of them and of what they address.

We’re visual people, we need books with pictures

Photo by SiamEye

It’s true. We are attracted to shiny stuff, and pretty pictures. And there are a lot of good books and websites that take the specs and turn them into a more readable piece of text, with nice illustrations, graphs, charts, demos, car crashes and explosions. No one seems very keen on reading the specs, only as a last resort, when all hell breaks loose.

But still, if we’re so eager to be respected as professionals, why is it so hard to accept that this is our mandatory assignment?

Yes, we have a lot on our plates already, it’s not fair

Photo by Sara Björk

The fact is that we are bombarded with new stuff to learn everyday. Anywhere we look at, there’s something new coming around the corner. It would be impossible to learn even the basics of all the things I would one day like to understand.

One of the things that I love about being a web designer is that I have to be willing to improve my skills constantly — if I stop, I’m at risk of being easily dated and replaceable. So just take it as another occupational hazard. Also, you can’t really complain about something if you haven’t even read it, right? And I hear a lot of complaining.

I promise you, it won’t hurt

Photo by Capture Queen ™

So go on and read a few chapters; do some examples at the same time, for more complicated sections (it’s true that some sentences make your brain explode).

You may even find little gems like this one:

This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections from the contents list and following all the cross-references.

:)

Discuss!

Attention, rant alert!

First things first: not everybody that uses Dreamweaver is using it in the Design mode, or even Split mode. Or uses the automatic CSS creator/editor tool.

My intentions with this post are not to convince anyone to move from whatever tool they’re using to Dreamweaver—just to make people understand that Dreamweaver is not that little evil tool everyone seems to think it is—a tool for people who can’t code.

One of the reasons I wanted to get a Mac was because then I would be able to use Coda. It looked so clean, intuitive and without all the clutter that Dreamweaver brings with it! Then I finally got my hands on to a Mac, and actually tried Coda: it didn’t last a day.

I’d like to be able to use a cooler or prettier tool, and, believe me when I say that I’ve tried a lot of them: Coda, Espresso, BBedit, Notepad, etc. I end up frustrated because simple things I’d like them to accomplish just aren’t there or, when they are, they’re not clear.

But don’t get me wrong: Dreamweaver is far from being perfect! It’s just that I’m more prepared to miss out on the great new features that keep popping from the new apps, than from the simple ones that Dreamweaver provides me with and that help me code faster.

I’m sorry I won’t be adding any screenshots to this post, I just have to let this out of my system as quickly as I can. :)

The details that matter to me

This list focuses on the way I use Dreamweaver, and that is mainly to code HTML and CSS. I’m aware that I don’t use it to its full potential, so this list could be so much longer, right?

So why do I like it so much then?

• It adds links to the external files your HTML is linking to at the top
• The list of colours, assets, links used in a Site
• It doesn’t close HTML tags as soon as I open then
• It closes HTML tags if I type “</“
• You get a list of all available CSS classes and ids when you're typing "class=" or "id="
• It auto-completes the properties in CSS files (yes, all the others probably do that as well)
• You can add strong, em, or headings, for example, with just Cmd+B, Cmd+I, or Cmd+1
• If you type "&" in your HTML code, you get a list of glyphs available
• It doesn't add annoying project files to my folders
• Search and replace across an entire site
• The inbuilt FTP: it's not great, but it's OK for quick uploads
• I can use the tab key to indent several lines of code without the need of a plug-in
• Update: If you set up a Site, and then change the name of a file (html, image file, etc.), it updates the links to that file within the Site
• Update: When inserting an img tag, after inserting the source file code, Dreamweaver adds the correct height and width automatically when you type in height and width

People keep trying to convince me to move from Dreamweaver (and sometimes I try to convince myself), but save your words if none of the above mentioned features is present in the tool you’re about to recommend.

I’d also like to add that I don't use Dreamweaver's live preview—I never got used to it because it used to suck (I've heard it's a lot better now though), so I use a combination of Firefox and Firebug to do the live editing.

The details that I don’t love, but that I can live with (or without)

• The price tag. At almost £400 (or $399), it’s quite expensive and sometimes prohibitive
• It can be slow
• It’s not as pretty
• It doesn’t know which properties have already been used for a particular tag
• Search and replace could be nicer (like Espresso’s)
• I’d like to have a more visual navigator (like Espresso, for example), but it has one that serves its purpose well
• Spelling checker: if there is one, I don’t know where it is (Espresso has it)

Dreamweaver is sad

So please, next time you say mean things about Dreamweaver, think twice, look at how sad it is:

Photo by protographer23

What would you like to add? Are you a Dreamweaver hater? Do you secretly use it when no one is looking?
Let me know in the comments section!