DigiKev » Web development

Digital Web and PR, The Lines Blur

Kevin Rapley — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:27:49 +0000

The landscape has changed when it comes to both Web and Public Relations (PR) professionals. PR cannot exist without social media, social networking, social bookmarking, tagging, RSS, E-Zines, Blogging, Vlogging, Podcast’s, SEO and Micro Blogging. If you’re in PR and you are not familiar with these terms you are antiquated. It is as clear cut as that. Journalists that you rely upon to get your story out have all adapted to these formats commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Clients demand web presence and not just a presence but a lively existence Online. Non adoption of the techniques required to make the clients voice heard will result in lacklustre success. This is nothing short of new information, PR 2.0—the term coined by Brian Solis—has been around since the 90’s.

My own experience as a Web professional has matured over the years that I have been working Online. From a budding web designer building with table based layout to adoption of standards compliant style sheets and XHTML followed by a sensibility to accessible and usable graphical interfaces. The latest adoption over the last few years has of course been everything mentioned within Web 2.0. The lines blur further as Web professionals are required to know how to market clients Web sites with improved ferocity. I for one am reading up on PR 2.0 and increasing my knowledge and skill set. The PR 2.0 and Web 2.0 professional cross over will require both parties to work much closer together within an agency environment. This is already being witnessed with companies such as McCaan Erickson appointing London’s Bite PR digital services and campaign arm—Robin Wilson, who was also on Bite’s board of directors—to bulster their own direction towards PR 2.0. However early adoption doesn’t seem to of taken place in the UK like seen in the US. A heartfelt and entertaining rant by Will McInnes highlights the problems being seen throughout PR professionals in the UK. There are a handful of digital PR agencies that do get it and probably one of my favourite websites for getting the message across is Diffusion.

Why graphic designers are not Web designers

Kevin Rapley — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:31:30 +0000

I used to think my vocation would always be graphic designer. Christ, I even took a degree course in graphic communication. However, I haven’t the foggiest about type setting or colour separation. These technical specifications are what graphic designers are au fait with—not me. This is why I soon left my course and landed my first Web design role at Diskeeper Corporation.

I knew my strengths lay in what we—online experts—have come to call today, digital media. Whereas the technical specifications of a graphic designer are type setting and colour separation plates, the Web designer working knowledge is in Web page expansion, graphical user interface (GUI) design and accessibility considerations.

There are cross-overs in the disciplines. Sure. Typographic sensibility, page balance and colour selection are inherent disciplines in all good designers. Essentially graphic and Web designers are bound by their maturity to design. They’re separated by their focus.

Proposed with the job to layout magazine column or brochure I would naturally put fourth a contact able to carry out the task. A thumbling attempt at completing the project would require too much learning and error on my part. Nor would it stoke my interest. I would hope that my graphic design contacts would extend the same favour and thinking if the glove was on the other hand having been asked to produce a series of Web page layout designs.

From experience in the creative industries and speaking with peers this is not always so. There is a tendency to place Web design in the hands of seasoned graphic designers. They make the decisions, call the shots, before passing the Photoshop file to a Web developer to muddle through.

Web designers have a discipline entirely their own. A Web designer is to produce unique, functional and appealing strategies that take account of a medium that will change dependent on platform, for instance the type of browser, the viewing device, even the screen resolution set by the end user. This is ever more prevalent today with mobile devices and the like.

This is merely a smattering off the top layer considerations for a Web designer. I will return to this topic in future posts. For the time being, what experiences have you of graphic design professionals attempting Web design? Perhaps you are a graphic designer who is tasked with Web related projects. Do you feel you are unable to complete the task fully due to inexperience? Does work get returned by developers saying it won’t work? What do the Web developers amongst you say, have you had to redesign work signed off for you to develop as they were unworkable?

Why aren’t experts like Microsoft being expert?

Kevin Rapley — Sat, 03 May 2008 22:32:54 +0000

It shocks me to see web programming examples breaking the rules of accessibility and common practices in published books. I don’t feel it sets the greatest of examples to anyone trying to get a foot in the industry when supposed authorities on subjects cannot even get it correct in their own publications. Take Microsoft Press for instance. Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5, published 2008. This is written by Dino Esposito, an authority on ASP.NET and AJAX. When it comes to writing HTML he seems to have forgotten the fact that we keep the code in lowercase. All of his HTML examples begin with a capital letter. Now I understand that ASP.NET is different and uses some uppercase characters for server side controls, but please let us not forget the industry standard for writing static HTML. Long have the days passed when HTML tags were written in complete uppercase and contained now deprecated elements such as FONT and CENTER.Furthermore another example I have spotted failed to include a DOCTYPE and the appropriate XML format for closing a HR tag. I realise this is not the purpose of the book and that the level of reader will most likely have a full understanding of how we conduct ourselves as web designer and developers in 2008. But why do experts insist on writing poor examples?

Let me take this even further. Being an organisation that should be getting this correct, Microsoft will bear the brunt of this again for not. There are plenty of examples within the Microsoft website where use of inaccessible and erroneous terms such as ‘click here’. Going back to the Microsoft Press example too, I was studying a script for SilverLight where it would display a message if a user did not have the plugin installed on their machine. This was again ‘click here to…’. If these are such expert guides to the technology for developing next-generation websites, then I think more care should be put in to eradicating these poor phrases and terms so that the next generation of web designers know not to do it.