Web Site Design, Amateurs vs Professionals
There are many people out there who can easily build a web site without actually knowing how to build one!
Companies such as Macromedia (now owned by Adobe) have a strong hold in the web site design market with software packages such as DreamWeaver, which presents the user with a series of buttons to press to build your website. This program can even build code in ASP and PHP without the user not knowing what the hell ASP or PHP are?
There are even a series of books available on how to use the program, one titled “Website Building for Dummies”, how appropriate!
I once was a button pressing web site builder. I didnt know how to write markup or any programming, but was able to produce ASP database websites for clients. Thats amateur for you. Yes i have to admit it, i used DreamWeaver.
Gone are those days…I now write my own markup with css and i leave the programming to the experts.
I refuse to comment on Microsoft FrontPage.
Markup - The website code
A friend of mine ask for my opinion of his new website, “show me the source code” i asked. my friend look stunned and asked back “what is source code?”.
Every single website is built by markup, its the fundamental language. Professionals can tell how good the web designer / builder is just by reading a few lines of markup.
There are bad, very bad and “oh my god, what the f**k is that” ways of writing markup to build a web site page. The good thing for amateur web site builders is that software programs like DreamWeaver and FrontPage, stick in its own brand of markup into your page without you even having to look at it, all you see is the design (what the user will see) and not its skeleton.
How to tell the difference between a professional web site designer and an amateur web site designer.
Do the following,
- give them a pen
- given them some paper
- now ask them to build a web site
I bet you they wouldn’t even know what the first tag is to write.
So, what’s the difference between “bad” markup and “good” markup?
With any good markup, it clearly shows that web site was built by someone who know’s the industry. It also helps search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to read the most important part of your website quicker, therefore indexing the pages to the correct potential customer market place.
The most important part of good markup, is to help keep to a professional web site design standard way of writing markup, which the W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium (which is run by the pioneer of the internet, Tim Berners Lee) provided guidelines of writing good markup which opens a opportunity for websites to be used by those who could normally never use the internet.