subject: How to have a great web production team [print this page] How to have a great web production team How to have a great web production team
Working within the web development business can make you a very tough individual, or a dreadfully soft person. It truly is dependent on your spirit.
I have the advantage of having both skills: designer and developer, which has helped me a lot in charting my path through the untamed seas of internet site design and development.
I learnt fairly early in the game that creative designers think like designers and developers are a completely different creature! Where, when a designer puts together a website, he is concerned more with how it looks. The same concern makes him focus on the details of where this line sits, how faraway from that other line and that image it ought to be, its color in addition to width... essentially style. Web designers are the Gucci's and Prada's of the web page creation process.
On the other hand, web builders are very seriously engrossed in HOW a web site works. Yes, there is a healthy element of how it looks, but that takes a back seat weighed against functionality.
When you visit Google's homepage, that uncomplicated page was the result of numerous concessions on the part of the designers and the developers. The designers will in all probability have wanted a background picture, and a picture of a smiling woman, or cute puppy sitting somewhere on the homepage, but the engineers would have said it would add to page-load time, and cost more in terms of bandwidth, that consumers would have to wait longer downloading useless, value-less material, reducing the amount of web pages viewed per visit...and so on and so on.
This battle between website design experts and website development gurus can make or break a job. If creative designers can't sway the developers, also known as the web programmers, to accept some visually appealing piece of design, it may possibly mean extra labor undoing along with redesigning what had already been accepted by a client. This alone could add weeks to what would have been a day's work.
Having worked on both sides of the fence, here is what I can advise:
Always have teams, designers and developers, there in preliminary conferences with the client. That alone will ensure everyone is familiar with what is doable and what is not.
Plainly define the working goals
Do not let the client run the show...but instead, keep him or her fully apprised of what is happening and as involved as possible.
Before designers start their work, they must be in concurrence with developers on expectations.
In the end, how a site functions is more important than how it looks, but it is the customer who decides in the end, so the client, the website designer and the web developers, must all yield to the king...the end user...
