5 things to ask your web designer
As a web design customer you’ll probably have seen or heard lots of industry buzzwords while searching for a web designer to work with. Terms like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, or SEO might have grabbed your attention, but, under all the gloss, how do you know if your designer isn’t going to pulling the wool over your eyes and give you a sub standard product? Here’s a few questions you should ask…
1. Do you hand code or use a WYSIWYG editor?
This one really sorts the men from the boys!
WYSIWYG editors are visual based HTML editing tools. They’re fine for amateurs, but the code they produce is often sloppy, flawed and can be full of errors, and no professional web designer wants that.
Dreamweaver is a popular WYSIWYG editor but it does have a proper coding interface as well, the only problem is that a “designer” might tell you they’re using Dreamweaver to hand code to make them sound better.
2. Do you code to W3C standards
The W3C provide the core standards for coding web pages, so as to ensure consistency as to how the many different web browsers render web pages. As far as self respecting web designers go these standards are the rule book to follow.
Why not test your own pages using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Ideally your site will be error free but if you have more than a couple of errors you should ask questions!
3. Will my site work with all the popular web browsers?
Your site should work perfectly in the latest web browsers: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and adequately in Internet Explorer 6 at the very least.
Support for older versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape and the myriad of other browsers is really a matter for you to decide. However, when catering for older browsers the cost benefit is often almost nil since older browsers might only account for < 0.5% of your total visitors.
4. Do you use HTML tables for layout?
If they say “yes” put down the phone, or walk out the room, it’s time to start looking elsewhere.
HTML tables are for presenting tabular data and not full web pages. You can use tables for layout purposes but it’s not advised - Why tables for layout is stupid.
5. Will my site be accessible to people with disabilities?
And I’m not just talking about blind people here. You have groups like the deaf, colour blind, people with paralysis or only partial use of fingers and hands, not to mention folks who have short memories, semi literate, or dyslexic. When you start add those up you run into millions of people just in the UK, all with billions of pounds to spend.
Accessibility starts with coding web pages to the W3C standards as mentioned earlier, and a compliant site will be a long way on the road to being accessible.
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