How to be a good web designer

Come with me, won’t you? We’re going to take a step outside the world of the designer-vs-client battle and look at another issue. I’ve read numerous articles on “how to handle” clients regarding everything from getting them to coaching them to how and when you should fire them. Most of these talk about taking charge and doing what you’re trained to do—design. Not a lot of them talk about taking off your designer hat and doing what is essential to please your clients (especially if you’re freelance)-that is, serving.

Let’s be real: Most clients are not egotistic know-it-alls that just want to belittle you. If they didn’t need help, you wouldn’t be working for them in the first place. And while you’ll always have clients who micro-manage things and really see you as more as a temperamental tool to their vision, that’s no reason to ignore their suggestions or chalk up their criticism to nothing more than a casual observer. In the world of design, we are about bringing other’s ideas to a visual and tangible result. We are the solution, not the problem.

Actually, if your client’s have a rough time about the project, it’s probably your fault. But that doesn’t mean that these things don’t happen often, it just means that we should know how to get around them. I’m going to give you some tips on getting to know how to serve your client better.

Take a great deal of time to understand your client’s concerns. It may very well be the thing you do more than actual designing, but what good is 40 hours of working on something that they hate? You might still get paid, but you won’t get referred, and you certainly won’t get re-hired. Take lots and lots of notes. Pay careful attention to the sites your client likes/dislikes and why. And finally, once you have a clear idea of your clients goals, execute well.

You can’t do it all, but do as much as you can. I have a client that doesn’t know a whole lot about computers, the internet or web design. He just knows that a website is a window of potential gain in his business and he wants to grab the opportunity. So when I created his site, I didn’t just put it all on a CD and leave it at his office. I took the time to get his domain name, make sure his site was hosted, and I was the go-between for him and the hosting team. In fact, I’m still paying his hosting and doing site maintenance for a monthly fee. By the law of reaping and sewing, I guarantee you that I’ll be the first guy he thinks of when someone else asks him about design. And as any designer will tell you, referrals matter greatly.

Stick with what you know. While I am primarily a web designer, I’m pretty handy at print design when I need to be. But recently I got a phone call for a position that was way over my head programming-wise. I know enough code to be quite dangerous, but I haven’t taken the time to seriously learn ASP or other stuff involved in the backend. How much of a help would I have been to go ahead and say “Yeah, I can do all that,” and then try to make it by on trial and error? In respect for the client and your own reputation, politely decline work that you can’t handle, be it because you don’t have the know-how or don’t have the time. If you can’t commit to a project because you’re busting at the seams with deadlines, then don’t. It’ll be better for you in the long run.

Execute with excellence. In addition to being a good designer and making your client happy with the project, be sure to follow up on it and ask about the success. Was it seen/noticed? When the projects over and done with, send some cookies or chocolates with a thank-you for being part of your paycheck. Touch base with them often to make sure things are still going well for them. If you start to actually care about them and their business, then they will actually care about you and yours. Not to say that they’ll give you a “pity project” just because you’re running dry, but you’ll keep yourself in the forefront of their mind and it’ll make you look really really nice. And everyone likes a nice designer. Don’t make yourself a nuisance, though. I wouldn’t call them more than once or twice a month unless they were in need of my help.

You’ve heard it before, I’ll say it again: going the extra mile can’t hurt. The least it will do is teach you character and show someone that you care. After learning these principles, it was not hard for me to see myself as what a designer really is: someone who sells a service. And the best way to sell a service is to become a servant.

What Is XSL

Remember the good old days, when the internet consisted of nothing more than a few simple websites formatted in basic HTML? Web design was so easy.You could just slap some graphics and text into a file, insert some HTML tags into the document to tell the web browser how the text should appear and what the structure of the page should be, and presto, the job was finished.

You could just slap some graphics and text into a file, insert some HTML tags into the document to tell the web browser how the text should appear and what the structure of the page should be, and presto, the job was finished.As time went on, web design became more arduous. Businesses, especially ecommerce businesses that depended upon their internet storefronts to make a living, began to present web designers with near impossible projects that were too difficult to complete with basic HTML. The data being used and the designs that were being implemented for websites required more versatile programming specifications.

What resulted was the evolution of new specifications and languages for creating web sites. Languages and sub-languages such as XML, XHTML, style sheets, and a host of other more refined and yet more flexible specifications were spliced together to take web design to a new level.

One of the most important languages that came to be in recent years is called XSL. What is XSL, you ask? Well, to totally understand what XSL is and why it is so important, you must first understand XML.

XML is a markup language just like HTML. XML was created to deal with the fact that HTML was limited in that all of its tags were predefined and it displayed data a certain way. XML has no predefined tags, and does not tell a computer how data should appear, it merely defines the data. So, using XML, a web designer can define all sorts of data and more effectively transmit this data to web browsers installed on different platforms that run on a variety of electronic gadgets such as cell phones and other handheld devices that now come equipped with internet access. In a nutshell, XML was created to deal with the fact that so many different electronic products now come equipped with access to the internet and email. These new devices run on platforms that do not always display data properly if it is coded using HTML. XML fixed this situation by simply defining data and not forcing the web browser to display it a certain way, because an XML file is merely a simple text file.

So, again you ask, what is XSL and why is it important? XSL stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language. You have probably heard of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a style sheet language that evolved to make it easier for web designers to create a style for an HTML web page. Because XML is now so important, and because XML tags, as explained in the previous paragraph, do not tell the web browser how data should appear, a stylesheet language that was XML-based became a necessity.

XSL consists of 3 components. The first and most important component is XSLT. XSLT transforms an XML document into another XML document that can actually be understood and displayed by a computer. It accomplishes this by transforming most of the document into XHTML, which is a more versatile, cross-platform, XML-based version of HTML.

The second part of XSL is XPath. XPath is used as the navigator for XSL. XSL uses XPath to find parts of the source document that should match a certain predefined template. When XPath finds what it is looking for, then XSLT takes over and performs a transformation, turning the source document into what is called the result document.

The final part of XSL is known as XSL-FO. This component is for the final formatting. Once XPath has searched through the source document and used XSLT to transform the source document into the result document, the document then needs to be formatted so that the web browser will be able to present the document with the proper layout and structure. Simply put, XSL-FO is the part of XSL that produces the final output.

There are all sorts of helpful online tutorials for programmers and web designers to begin to learn how to use and implement XSL, but it would probably be best take a course in XSL at a local institute, college, or wherever you can find one. If web design is your career, learning it is not an option, it is a necessity, as most web browsers are now capable of understanding XSL. Since the advent of wireless internet access, everything from cell phones, to palm tops, to computer screens in automobiles can be used to connect to the internet. These different devices run on different platforms and have different web browsers that cannot properly display many elements of the HTML programming language. As a result, it is critical for all web designers to be able to create web pages using cross-platform specifications with the adaptability provided by XSL.