Learning to let go

[David]

I enjoy web design but one of the most difficult aspects is letting go of your designs once they have been completed. Handing them over to the client and (in many cases) losing control of the site and the design.

We live in a world where everyone is a website designer and many of my clients who are happy with the inital site design take it upon themselves to maintain and develop the site. They are perfectly entitled to do this.

About three and a half years ago I did a web design project for Parliament Hill School in Camden and I was quite pleased with the result and so were they. I keep an archive snapshot (http://www.curiousfish.co.uk/phs/) of the site for portfolio purposes.

Three years on, the actual site looks like this (http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/leas/camden/schools/parliament-hill/homepage/home).

Everyone is a website designer. Is it really worth the extra effort getting things to look just so, optimizing that image to the nth degree, making your code as clean and lean as possible. Do we do these things for our own sense of satisfaction?

Probably. Learning to let go is tough.

Links mended, sorry...
Message edited by David - Jan 26, 2004, 9:08 PM

[francis]

So, what's the fish obsession?

The first link is a 404 and the second is a copy of the first!

That's one easy to remember URL the school has got (http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/leas/camden/schools/parliament-hill/homepage/home/). Great for promotion, putting on business cards for teachers and really reasy for parents to remember.

Here's one for Ronald: "Some areas are enhanced with Macromedia Flash 6"

From the experience I've had, the client wants the earth and within a couple of weeks has hacked the results to shreds.

[David]

OK, here's one I did earlier. Just to prove that I would never ask you to do something I haven't already done myself :D

See the first post for details.

The 404 was caused because I recently changed the DNS settings for the domain and there were a few problemettes, now resolved.

[Tom]

This is important. My view is that unless the client has an in-house web manager then the site should probably be designed with an easy layout and easy technology so that the client CAN chop and change. David would know more about it then me but I fear one of the problems with the Landscape Institute (http://www.l-i.org.uk/) website is that they paid someone to do the design and don't want to pay them each time it needs a modification. I wrote in to complain about that nauseous running text at the top of the page - and no one replied. That was over a year ago.

One of the big successes of the Ford Model T was that it came with its own toolbox, so that you could risk driving the car without a mechanic to hand. Websites need to be made this way, until every secretary can manage the content. I continue to favour FrontPage for projects like school websites because (1) most offices have a copy (2) its not too hard to learn for a Word user. One member of our school office (Jenny) is learning FrontPage. I doubt if one of them has heard of Dreamweaver and as for PHP.....

[David]

As a matter of interest, Bentley School have asked if the website can be designed in such a way that it can be updated using Macromedia Contribute 2 and that the editorship will rest with a single person within the School. I'll send you their full brief soon. This at least gives the designers the option of protecting the page design and layout whilst allowing clients to update information.

[Tom]

I guess Bentley has a web-savvy parent who suggested using Macromedia Contribute. The advantage would be that teachers and pupils would find it easy to contribute content. The disadvantage would be that the school would have to have a Dreamweaver-enabled member of staff to make structural changes to the website, or else go back to the outside design team. So might the school be better off using FrontPage 2003?

[David]

Actually, Contribute was a suggestion of mine at a meeting I had with them last November. Their main concern is that they can easily update the site with news and pupil work. They want to be able to update the site every half-term (about 6 weeks) and they have one member of staff dedicated to this task but want to make the process as easy as possible.

I suggested an annual review of the site with any major work being undertaken outside of the School. The initial site may need some "redundancy" built into it so that they can expand/populate the site in the short term.

[Tom]

As I said, the idea must have come from a web-savvy parent.