I’ve been hard at work for the past few days on a new website design for my design company, XLD Studios and I feel I’ve come up with something nice that’s just been released. I’m happy to be able to start 2009 off with concluding both a successful 2008 for my company (which kinda includes this site) and to be able to start off 2009 with giving both my sites refreshers.
Go and make your voice heard now on what you think matters most on a website! I figure this is a very interesting thing to look on and as I plan on making an article sometime in the future about this, make your voice heard and get into the article!
I’ve been reading more and more people who are really advocates for showing clients coded designs and never Photoshop/Fireworks files. Their biggest reason for this is the fonts. You can really never get accurate font preview in a Photoshop file as compared to the final web result. This is an argument that I fully buy. It’s pointless to try to show how a design will look with fonts in a web browser, but in a jpeg file instead.
The real main con, as I see it, with this method is that it is going to take a little more time. It does mainly depend on how fast of a coder you are. It’s so much simpler just to send of a jpeg file to a client with the design in, have them change their mind as usual and then code it. To me that seem like the most logical order (perhaps since I’m used to it by now), partly probably because I’m working faster in Photoshop than I code.
There is perhaps a mid-range option here. What you’ll do is that you do the design in Photoshop as usual, save out a jpeg file (with no fonts) and then just quickly place a floating, absolute div over the jpeg file, previewing how the fonts would look on your design.
I want to bring up just another bit as well; my personal experience with this. I must say I’ve yet to get a client that complains when they get their final version that it differed like the one I showed “before”. If most people know it is sample, or don’t care about the change, I don’t dare to speculate in just now but it gets me thinking if I really need to put that much energy into finding a solution to a thing that isn’t super broke.
In the end, my opinion about this on the whole, is that if you are a quick coder. By all means, do show clients a coded version if the coding for you is one of the heavy parts, then don’t. Showing the designs in a jpeg file seems to work and I’m not sure how much difference it would mean to clients if you showed the coded one.
Now, if Adobe would just get an option in the type tool to render the text as a web browser does, I’d be much happier…
In this day and age it’s possible to make a website relatively easy and if you know Photoshop it’s definitely super easy. There are many programs such as Sitegrinder 2 and even Dreamweaver that helps you with this process and that could be all good, at least it seems all good. There is usually just one big flaw, the code is no good.
Continue reading “Pros and cons of making a website “the easy way”” »
It’s busy times right now preparing the shop windows and all for the summer and sales and I’m a bit of the in-house web designer and design/tech guy so I actually get to do a lot of it.
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