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Farming Out The Creative Process

Finding and starting to use a decent graphical web designer was a huge turning point for me as a "web design" company. In fact I never really was a web design company until I started to use a designer. Rather I was a developer doing development with the odd bit of design fudged in where needed.

Now that I use a designer the sites I create for my customers are in a different league to what I was doing before. Not only is the end result so much better, but I have more time to do what I am best at — coding and building the site.

This coding process usually involves taking whatever the graphic designer came up with and translating his vision in to browser-ready HTML and CSS. This is often a time-consuming and painful process. That's why, to free up even more of my time, I've started having somebody else do this bit. Not only can I now forget about the quirks of the browser and exactly which way to float a positioned div, but I make more money can pass on savings to the customer as the HTML guy's day rate is less than my own.

Such are the number of browser quirks that there now exists people who make a living out of knowing about them all and being able to easily turn a page mock-up in to cross-browser standards-compliant HTML and CSS. Rather them than me.

All that's left for me to do is slice all this HTML up, plug it in to Domino and make it come alive with functionality. The fun bit I guess.

Part of my job satisfaction comes from knowing I've created something that I can sit back and look at thinking "Yeah, I made that!". That's why I'd always worried that I wouldn't get this feeling if so much of the creative process was out of my hands, but that's not been the case at all. I can still look with pride at sites I've worked on where all I did was code the back-end. Even when I'm not the designer it's still quite a hands-on process in managing other people and making sure the customer gets what the customer wants.

Damn, did I just refer to myself as a manager!?

Comments

  1. Does that mean we can apply for your current position at Rockall as you move up the ladder? ;-)

  2. @Jake...I think you hit on the perfect combination for sure! Most of us as developers are fairly design illiterate. Sure, I can make a clean and usable design, but when I want to do something really fancy, I find that it's best to "hire a professional". As you rightly point out, it puts you in another league when you rely on someone that has hot design skills. Couple that with the great pains we go through to deal with browser compatibility and it's easy to see why you took this path. Congratulations for making the leap...it's often hard to give up the control! Cheers... :-)

  3. The browser quirk issue is actually one of the biggest advantages I see to JavaScript frameworks like Ext: someone else has already abstracted the various quirks inside a model that takes each of them into account. It's still valuable for us to be aware of them, of course, but the less time we have to spend focusing on them on a project to project basis, the more power we can provide clients in a timely fashion.

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Wed 16 May 2007 07:58 AM

    You can apply Vitor but I'm not sure what the job description would be!

  4. Hi Jake,

    Do you know where I can find some table or information that helps to estimate how long I can take to make a Notes Client Application web accesible ?

  5. I think delegation is something most of us developers are afraid of, but once you tried it, you will never go back.

    I have a few projects coming up this summer and the plan is to do use the same approach as Jake: use a CSS/HTML specialist, a computer graphic artist and I will take care of putting all of this together.

    That way, I beleive the time to market for my things will be a lot faster. Not cheaper, but I will at least have the time toreally concentrate on the functionalities of my apps and less on the bells and whistles.

    Let experts be experts in their respective domain.

  6. Hi Jake, I just did exactly what you said. I hired a designer and a HTML coder to create a website for me. After they finish their work, I do the connections with backend db's. I think that's the best way of creating cool websites.

    Regards,

    Rafael

  7. Are there any large companies, that provide this kind of service, that someone can recommend?

    Thanks, Darin

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Thu 17 May 2007 09:20 AM

    Yes, Darin. I can recommend Rockall Design ltd. They're brilliant.

    • avatar
    • Aden
    • Fri 18 May 2007 07:35 AM

    Hi Jake,

    Do you make all your websites XHTML compliant/valid.

    Aden

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Fri 18 May 2007 07:43 AM

    Yes, Aden. Well, as far as it's possible with Domino.

    • avatar
    • Jaap
    • Sun 20 May 2007 08:51 AM

    Jake, could you share some of your (handcraftmade;-) websites with us, I am ofcourse curious now reading your article here.

    Thanks

    Jaap

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Sun 20 May 2007 09:52 AM

    Will do soon Jaap.

  8. @Jaap: my blog is handcraftmade in Domino. It is in XHTML and about creating Domino websites by hand ;-)

    • avatar
    • Jaap
    • Tue 22 May 2007 11:31 AM

    Great result Michel, like the tooling you described , stripegenerator ;-) never heard of that one. I have now 2 blogs on my desktop;-)

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Written by Jake Howlett on Wed 16 May 2007

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

Your host is Jake Howlett who runs his own web development company called Rockall Design and is always on the lookout for new and interesting work to do.

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