Interview with William Mathis (President, at-websolutions.com)

Our blog welcomes William Mathis of president at-websolutions.com. This is our first interview with developer on this blog.

Mr.Mathis, how and when you become web designer?
First, I started out as a graphic designer and graduated from a design school (Platt College) in 1993. I was working as a corporate regional graphic designer for a large brokerage firm here in San Diego, creating high-end media presentations and marketing materials. This is around 1997. At the time, I had a broker that came to me and was interested in starting and online website for a professor that can teach online to his students. It would also be linked and embedded with the San Diego State University website. I had a friend, which also graduated from Platt, which I knew he was doing web design. After assisting him with obtaining the project, he explained that I should consider adding web design to my skills, which would open other opportunities. My friend suggested that I study a book, Peachpit’s best seller “HTML for the World Wide Web” to learn html. Then from there I purchased a domain and and created my website (while creating the website I was learning more and more…), launched it, and the rest is history.

What is web design for you? Web design is an extension of your graphic design skills and creative ability, but utilized on a different medium. You also have to think three-dimension instead of two (creative, graphic usage know how, limited color control, content placement and format, and html, javascript or other scripting control and abilities). As a graphic designer your output is to film then print, in web design your output is to the World Wide Web. Your audience is more broad and seeking information, instead of condense and targeted, and visual presentation and representation is highly important to capture the reader or search audience. Web design pushes your creative ability and forces you to work in a non-tradition environment or medium. In other words, web design is universal and sometimes unpredictable. That’s the challenge of web design and the designer. It can be a rewarding experience for any web designer that can see their hard work put together and the site is well-rounded, represented and everything is working properly, and your client is satisfied and happy.

What is advantages of freelancers vs web studios? That’s a very good question. I believe freelancers or a different kind of “animal”, if you don’t me saying. Freelancers are independed and self-reliant on not just their design and knowledge of their trade skills, but on several skills. I believe that to be a successful freelancer it will require you to be more aggressive, assertive, flexible, multi-tasked, resourceful and know how to network. As a freelancer, you can be sure to expect that you will be working longer hours, 12-14 our days are not uncommon. Good people and communication skills is a must, the ability to sell your services, and making sure you meet client deadlines and expectations. There is more pressure on the Freelancer, because everything you do is a reflection of you as a person, designer, consultant, your ethics and more. You will need to have or develop discipline. Freelancers take on the responsibility of several personnel as if it were a business environment. As far as advantages, I believe the rewards are not just profit or the amount of money your can make, but the opportunity to gain personal recognition, client retention, referral rewards, and finally the feeling of being successfully in depended and working what you enjoy doing the most.

Web studios: I don’t believe that there is much to say about or compare about web studios and freelancers. From my experience everything is the same with the exception that projects are in-house with designers or outsource to freelancers, you may also have personnel conducting direct sales, cold calls, account management or having an outside sales team (independent sales contractors) selling web site development, website upgrades, SEO (search engine optimization), content and database management, including web hosting. The advantages of web studios and their business services is about doing the numbers and having enough flexibility of service offering. The advantages are the more websites that you can build, contract, manage or offer additional services as mentioned, the more lucrative the business is. The target is dollars and residual income. Some web studios are being more diverse and at which can be run by a two to three team member. Everything else is outsourced and contracted. But, as a business or web studio in this comparison, the more at risk. It’s a very competitive industry and very reliant on others to assist in driving the business, and the industry is always changing, there are going to be high’s and low’s, it’s the challenge of finding a good balance as a web studio.

What technologies and tools do you like and use?
That’s very large question: Dual Xeon servers, featuring firewalls and load balancing, with independent servers for individual resources such as web, ftp, databases, email, etc. for enterprise level web hosting. Rather than using the traditional hosting architecture where you operate all resources on the same shared server, we split each service out to its own cluster of security hardened servers. “How is that for starting out to answer the question?”. To be more down to earth, I utilize different technologies all the time, it all depends on what is evolved. As far as web design goes, I’m usually on a high performance Dell PC 3.4 GHZ (Ok, stop throwing the things at me you MAC lover’s. Because I do, use a MAC also.) with 3 GB of RAM, 1GB bus system and every hardware candy you can think of. Software application are: Dreamweaver 8, Photopshop and ImageReady, Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw (if necessary, never know what application clients utilize to create their original graphics.), Macromedia Flash, Fireworks, SwishMax, and others. To long to list them.

How do you improve your skills, how do you update?
I’m always keeping on eye out on the industry changes. There is plenty of sites out on the net can provide you with upcoming new generation of things to come and what is the hottest technology or software usage for web design. Everyday is a new learning experience, and if I find out about something new, I’m usually on it and attempting to learn as much as I can about it. Most of the time it’s hands on and lots of research and studying during down time.

What do you consider good and bad in web design?
A� good design not only makes visual sense, but every link is working properly and is uniform and simple to navigate to specific content or pages for information. One of the biggest mistakes when I started out as a web designer is that I had this habit of putting all the effort in graphics and making it look “real cool”. Which made the site load too long and once it was loaded fully on the page, all you saw was graphics and animations. To begin a good designer needs to keep in mind on graphic images and file size. Having an excellent graphic file compression software for your graphics is very important, effective loading time is one of many priorities, if not the first. You want to test the website under different connection speeds and browsers. One of the other most important thing to remember is that a web page may not display the same in different browsers. Not all browers react the same or display web pages in a consistant manner from one to another, (ie, Netscape, Explorer, or Mozilla Firefox) you will need to know how to “tweek your code” to establish some kind of consistency.

A bad web design is not taking the time to do your “home work” on effectively building a web page. “Think out-of-the-box mentality”. There is plenty of books and reading material on the internet to assist you as a web designer. A bad design is….well, a bad design. Today, you really don’t have to be a master and knowing how to code html or other forms of html versions, there are WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) web applications that can do it for you. But, I suggest you learn the html and learn the basics. Then learn javascript and other important scripting that you may need one day to use.

Do you prefer open sources or custom made softwares?
Funny about the question regarding Open Source software. I was a Marketing Communications Manager for a company that marketed a heterogeneous data enterprise backup software application. It is marketed to the Linux and Unix industry. I do prefer to custom made software or in this case industry software applications, but I do support the Open Source software community that are behind it and it’s movement. At the current moment I utilize or seek out Open Source software if I need to find an application that I need immediately.

Can you always satisfy your customers, if not what are reasons?
As a rule, I always keep an open mind regarding new prospects and current customer clientele. You can keep a customer satisfied by being responsive in a timely manner to their needs and providing up most customer service. Sometimes just calling a customer “out of the blue” or sending an email and checking that everything is OK, and if they have any questions your available. Being honest about “what you can do for your customer” vs “what you can probably could do” is being honest about yourself, your abilities, and to show respect to your customer. If anything, you will gain respect from a customer for your honesty. You don’t always have to “take on” or “win their confidence” to every customer that comes to you so that you can retain an account or make money. It’s OK not to know the answer, but have a follow-up with good information. Best to be honest about your ability to satisfy a customer than to fail of not living up to your word and capabilities.

How do you see the future of the web design?
I see that in the future that more and more people without design and code experience will be able to build websites on their own. The industry is already being effected by it. What use to be a specialized service, will evolve to where clients have the capability to design their website from an online server-side graphical and content management application, and they have been around for at least the last 4-5 years. In most cases a customer can build a website from a control panel through their web hosting service. It may not look custom, but is effective for practically $0 with no out-of pocket expense. This will drive quotes and pricing down from what was five years ago. Five years ago, I was making $7,000 to $10,000 a month on web design and I was very busy. Now when conducting a bid on the net for projects, I see designers that are bidding on a website project that require needs for e-commerce, special scripting, database requirements, customized graphics / photos, and content management capabilities on the fly that are being bid at $500 or less’s, and can be promised on certain number of days. Are these web designers starving or what? There is no way that I can be dishonest and tell a client that for $500 that I can have their site done in 7 days to 14 days with that kind of need.

For web designer to stay competitive, we will probably need to expand or become knowledgeable in all areas of the web design industry. It’s already very competitive, there are hundreds if not, thousands of web designers. SEO is the probably the next thing to do and have under your hat as a web designer. Diversifying yourself as a web designer to include traditional graphic design service in addition to web design can be very effective. At this moment, I’m working on my creative skills for Flash web page design. I’m also using SwishMax. I see that websites will be more a high-end look, feel, and content driven in a multimedia format. Much like a very cool commercial. Website branding will come into play in the future. Time to prepare.

What do you advice beginners?
Hmm, my advice to beginners is to first learn about how a web page is made and how it works in a very basic format. Go to the nearest book store to seek web design books that provide the know how, but also provide visual examples. Study and practice creating graphics and producing low file sizes. Utilize a industry graphic software like Photoshop or Illustrator and learn to convert images to jpeg or gif. Remember photos are utilized in jpeg, vector graphics are converted to gifs, if you don’t have the funds to purchase these high-end software applications, then go to site like Zdnet.com, Downloads.com, Freeware.com and you should find low cost software applications that you can download, try for free or purchase. Practice and practice your skills. Master the application.

From there use a WYSIWYG web design application like Dreamweaver or InDesign (there are others). Learn how to place content and importing graphics on to the web page. You should be able to view the page in html format, study the code, try to use a blank web page and type the code in html format setup and see if it comes out the same. I also suggest that you will need to learn how tables and cells are utilized to hold text content and graphics and practice with them. Learn how to publish sites, using ftp programs and other web file management software. Create links and study the code. Learn how to create a basic form page, code it correctly and test it to see if you can retrieve it throught email. One program you can use is “formmail”, you can google it on the net to download the code and it’s instructions.

The other thing I would like to leave as advice is to keep it “Simple”, and keep learning as much as you can and have fun. Remember, web designing is fun and is an extension of your creative ability and know how, and has financial rewards. So have some fun! Wishing all the beginners success!