{"id":1958,"date":"2013-11-21T21:18:44","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T21:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/?p=1958"},"modified":"2013-11-21T21:18:44","modified_gmt":"2013-11-21T21:18:44","slug":"web-development-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/web-development-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"What web development is to an outsider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About three years ago, I was at my brother-in-law&#39;s house and we got to talking about web development. He asked me how someone gets started in this industry.<\/p>\n<p>I started explaining that if you have a somewhat decent understanding of math and logic, you should be able to pick up a book and gain a basic understanding in just a few hours. He wondered what math has to do with it. The conversation got cut off before I had a chance to explain.<\/p>\n<p>Another year later, we shared a vacation house with my bro-in-law&#39;s family. I, of course, had to bring my laptop along to spend a couple hours each morning &quot;staying current&quot;. My bro-in-law happened to catch a glimpse of my desktop, which had Eclipse open at the time. &nbsp;I can&#39;t recall what was in the editor, but it was most likely ColdFusion or PHP code. His response: &quot;Wow!&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>He had obviously crafted an image of web development in his mind that involved a graphical editor, lots of mouse drags to create shapes and boxes and maybe a color palette. &nbsp;When he saw all those curly braces, colons and lines of text that didn&#39;t look at all like English sentences, it became a little more clear what I was referring to with the &quot;math and logic&quot; requirement.<\/p>\n<p>My bro-in-law is in the construction industry. He&#39;s far enough removed from web development that I completely understood his perception.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#39;s zoom in a little closer to web development &#8211; marketing.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>What web development is to a marketing manager<\/h3>\n<p>Every one of my clients does some kind of web marketing, some more than others. The common ground between all of them is email newsletters.<\/p>\n<p>In most cases, the marketing manager is the one who ties together the copywriter, designer &amp; web developer to create a newsletter. This newsletter is typically sent out monthly and carries the same basic style, so the &quot;issue&quot; is both recognizable by the recipient and easy to duplicate by the marketing team.<\/p>\n<p>It seems that the second part of that (easy to create future newsletters that are based on a common format) isn&#39;t widely understood. Almost every one of my clients will follow this process for each newsletter issue:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Create the copy<\/li>\n<li>Give the copy to the designer<\/li>\n<li>Designer &quot;applies&quot; the copy to the newsletter template<\/li>\n<li>Design is handed off to the web developer in the form of a PDF file<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This process leads me to believe that the marketing manager is making one of two assumptions about the process to &quot;code&quot; a newsletter.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The web developer has software specifically designed to convert a PDF file into an HTML email.<\/li>\n<li>The web developer has a tool where content can be entered into a form (title, paragraph 1, paragraph 2, image), which outputs an HTML email.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That may be a stretch, but I bet I&#39;m not far off.<\/p>\n<p>So how can we effectively convey how we modify a newsletter or web page, so our client or marketing manager can decide who needs to be involved?<\/p>\n<p>I&#39;ve had an idea in my head about this, so here&#39;s my shot at getting into visual form. I&#39;m starting to think that taking 15 minutes to craft a simple image for your client or marketing manager could go a long way towards streamlining their change request process. The image below is just one idea.<\/p>\n<p>This, of course, is not limited to email newsletters. I&#39;d think this would be even more valuable for a website, or perhaps to explain to your client which areas of a CMS they are able to edit, and which must be handled by the developer.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/website-template-cms.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"website template cms\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1984\" height=\"400\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/website-template-cms.png\" width=\"569\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/website-template-cms.png 569w, https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/website-template-cms-300x210.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 569px) 100vw, 569px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>What web development is to a designer<\/h3>\n<p>Perhaps the closest job function to a web developer is the designer. Designers have varying levels of experience. Some come from a print background, where others focus solely on web design. I&#39;ve actually found that the most beautiful designs come from print designers, but they need a little &quot;tweaking&quot; to make them web ready.<\/p>\n<p>In my experience, most web designers are familiar with HTML, but haven&#39;t worked with anything other than table-based layouts, perhaps in a WYSIWYG editor. This typically means they&#39;re not familiar with the growing capabilities of CSS and are usually unaware of page load time.<\/p>\n<p>Without basic knowledge of these two areas, a web designer may produce layouts with the following bandwidth consuming qualities:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Repeating background images that don&#39;t work with image sprites<\/li>\n<li>Images requiring transparent backgrounds, but don&#39;t compress well in PNG format &nbsp;(photographs)<\/li>\n<li>Patterns or styles that can <strong>almost<\/strong> be duplicated with CSS alone, but not quite<\/li>\n<li>Fonts that aren&#39;t web safe (requiring loading font library)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/transparent-png-web-dev.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"transparent-png-web-dev\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1989\" height=\"355\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/transparent-png-web-dev.png\" width=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/transparent-png-web-dev.png 600w, https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/transparent-png-web-dev-300x177.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Excuse my artwork, I&#39;m not a designer \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>This goes back to educating the people you work with about web design. While a marketing manager can get away with simply knowing which areas of a website require a designers input and which don&#39;t, the designer should have a somewhat deeper understanding.<\/p>\n<p>A web designer who has even a primitive understanding of CSS can make a powerful addition to any web development team. Armed with the knowledge of just a few best practices, a web designer can make the transition from photoshop file to code a far more efficient process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not everyone needs to be able to write HTML with one hand and no backspace key. But non-programmers that are close to the web development process can provide more valuable input if they have a understanding of the basic components that make up a website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1976,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amp_status":""},"categories":[236],"tags":[222,273],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1958"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1991,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions\/1991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}