Blogging Design.
I have been building websites for around 10 years. Yet, day in and day out, I see new designers coming out with beautiful websites. Often, they’re virtual newbies to the web design world. I certainly haven’t studied the art of designing websites and have never taken a graphic design course, so I always wonder how much some of these people truly study and experiment on a design before they go out and reveal it. If I can’t build a website that I’m happy with in a night, I’ve failed myself. I suspect most people work much longer on a design, especially if it involves graphic design or even drop shadow and curved corners. But it frustrates me that I am self-taught so many years ago, and have been doing it this long, but do not feel competent enough to make a living off of it. I don’t mind building for other people. I’ve been paid twice (by the same person) to build a website from scratch. I was also paid to maintain an already built website (and as a side project I turned the table design into a CSS-only design). I have also built several websites for college organizations I was involved in, but I have never been thrilled, or felt that my work appeared to be done by a professional. Yet, at least two of those college organizations still have those designs live (4 years later?), and one organization actively updates the content within the design. A graduate school organization I have involvement with is currently hoping I will design something for them. (I did, but just wasn’t that happy with the results.)
I get stuck within the confines of a grid and figuring out how to make a text-only website stick out and appear interesting. It’s difficult for me, and I frequently end up borrowing heavy inspiration (though rarely do I borrow code) in order to come up with something. Then, I sometimes try to spruce it up with graphics…only I have very little skills in that respect. When I’m building for myself, it’s even harder to accept that a design is good enough to post. Up to this point, I have had too much pride to hire a designer to build something for me. And of course, I’m saying all of this on a Wordpress template!
If anyone has any thoughts on becoming more competent in web design, and getting over my inferiority complex when it comes to my design abilities, I’d appreciate it. And if you want to get me started on how the heck people learn PHP, Perl, C++, C#, Java(script), XML, and write scripts and databases and blogging platforms, that’s another can of worms, as I’ve never had much programming skill or understanding of it.
And then, on the other hand, is the question of: How much does design truly matter if the content is quality? Should I feel awful for using a default template or *gasp* purchasing a template? (I think I’d rather pay a designer to build something custom than purchase a template that may be used on another website.) I always thought it was funny when people sell “exclusive” templates; meaning they only sell it once. I suppose that’s an easy way of designers not having to deal with people and their visions as it’s truly WYSIWYG for both sides of the deal. I might not be opposed to that as much, but I find templates are always flashy and doo-daddy and beep and do things that I wouldn’t want the vast majority of my websites to do.
So, there’s a rant on design. I have so much more I could say…don’t get me started on XSitePro.
November 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am
[...] frustrated when I cannot design something I am comfortable with in one day’s time. See my rant on my web design frustrations from January 2006. But in the case of this blog, I was recently tagged as part of a blog [...]