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Courses on Making Professional, Usable Websites?
Hagmonk asks: "I've been writing website backends in Perl, PHP, and MySQL for years now. It's always been about the functionality though, not the presentation. What I'd now like to do is offer clients a complete service - a professional backend, -and- a professionally designed front end (both from an aesthetic and usability standpoint). The thought of heading to a 'typical' website design course frightens me. I don't want to waste my time being spoonfed the very basics. I want a course that teaches me graphics manipulation, layout and usability. I want it in a strong espresso shot of a month tuition max, not spread over a lazy year. Do such courses exist? In Australia or on-line?"
Learn what your pallete is and how to work within the boundaries of it. The best website design houses are staffed not with computer programmers, but with folks with degrees in art.
If you're serious about becoming a front end designer, you ought to think seriously about getting further education and possibly a degree in art from a nearby college.
I have been pwned because my
Learn typography. You'll get tons out of it because a lot of the things you'd learn that apply to print media regarding text apply to the web.
We are a web development company - all code gets written by us, all design by a graphics design company we're friends with. Sure we have to budget for their fees too, but at the end we get a highly functional, highly professional site.
He's the man on this one.
Check his web site for things like this...
http://www.useit.com/
I think you may be underestimating the skill and experience a good front-end designer brings to bear on a project. Imagine somone asking "I know how to code pretty HTML and I'm a photoshop wizard, but now I want to do a 2-week course and learn servlets and database programming so I can offer the whole package".
You can absolutely look at improving your skills as a designer - someone mentioned Nielsen, you might also want to read Alan Cooper's "The inmates are running the asylum", and Joel Spolsky's book on user interface design, and maybe grab a book on general graphic design basics (colours, typography, layout) - if you have a good eye and are meticulous, that should improve the general look of your work. Just don't expect to go on a 2 week course and become a UI whizz.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
Just hire a graphic designer. He's gonna do a good job and you'll both benefit from it. Of course, you have to raise the price of the website to include the third-party person/group, but then, even the client will be happy to do so...
So far a lot of people have been suggesting to get some training in art, graphic design or to hire someone with such experience. I think people are confusing nice looking with usable. I have seen a lot of great looking sites that are an absolute bitch to use. Things like site navigation theory and methods are not generally a skill that artists or graphic designers have worked to master. Usability engineering is something separate from both graphic presentation and back-end nuts and bolts design.
I don't really have any suggestions on where to acquire the required skills but I think it is important to realize that usability work is it's own independent skill.
In my experience, you're probably better off training yourself, using online material. Think to yourself when you visit sites, "why doesn't this site work properly, what could I do to improve it?"
http://www.37signals.com/better.php is a great resource for an analysis of aras of a few selected (high profile) websites and why they let down their audience.
Remember, just because you can create an amazing looking website, doesn't mean it works amazingly well. You might want to look at the Gnome/KDE/Windows documentation on the User Interface standards, for even more input into why certain things are done in certain ways.
The golden rule? K.I.S.S.
--- Stop the world! I want to get off!
Learn to Draw.
There are millions of online courses that teach you to draw, it ill help you tremenduously.
Not just in desing but in everything.
It helped me !
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
Can't give you *specific* advice on courses per se, but you'd generically want to look at courses that teach you classical design theory (in a media-agnostic sense), as opposed to merely courses that teach you *web-designing*. Won't turn you into a creative genius overnight, but knowledge of proper design principles (such as the "Gestalt Principle" or understanding which colours match etc) always helps.
More than mere navel gazing.
... if it'd be easier/quicker/possibly-cheaper-but not-necessarly to hire a web consultant to make you a site, and very carefully watch everything he does. I personally have learned a lot that way, my former company brought in a couple of web people and they were more than happy to 'brag about' every little choice they made. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
Not necessarily in Australia, but...
The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design Seminar
Info Design
Online training
Online Web design courses
Don't Make me Think by Steve Krug.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Lots of tutorials, some more technical than others: webmonkey. Wired said they're pulling the plug, however, so you might want to archive the site if HD space permits.
--
$tar -xvf
Since web-sites are all about sharing information or nice looking girls, it might be very worthwile to look at "Information Mapping".
The Information Mapping method is a research-based approach to the analysis, organization, and visual presentation of information.
See web-site of professor Robert Horn for a start. Unfortunately, his web-site doesn't use the techniques :), but you'll find some usefull PDFs.
Site: http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/The designer of the slashdot site could also use a background on Information Mapping(R), IMHO :)
http://blog.astyran.sg
For most browsers, CSS works. But it's not just about formatting the page with CSS, it's about designing your pages so that when the CSS fails, it doesn't look like a load of crap.
[I did a lot of coding in the days when <TABLE> was new, and you'd have to do some extra tricks to make sure that Mosaic and Lynx wouldn't display a bunch of run-on text.]
CSS also works rather well with
A few starting points --
- Design Graphics Magazine I'm not sure if it's still in print, but it's Australian, so they might give pointers to some user groups of interest in your area
- CSS Tutorial by W3Schools Something to get you started on CSS
- A List Apart, articles on doing tricky things with CSS
- Eric Meyer's writings. Links to articles and such by the author of ORA's CSS: The Definitive Guide. [read the Web Review articles from 2000 for some of the real power of CSS]
- Learning CSS a list of books and online resources
- Westciv courses on-line courses on CSS, CSS2 and some free resources.
Of course, knowing how to make things look good is completely different from actually doing it -- Lots of people know how to use a paint brush, but not all of our work makes it past our parent's fridges.With a bit of reading, the average programmer should be able to at the very least, keep their pages from looking like complete crap. As always, if you see a cool website out there, look at the source, and see if you can figure out how they did it. [but just because it worked, doesn't mean that it's not a complete hack, and that it won't break in every other browser out there].
Try things. Make mistakes. Learn from them. That's the best way that I've found to improve over the years.
oh -- and don't forget -- design is design. For the most part, design concepts work in both print and on the screen. There are people who think HTML should be able to do everything they can do in a PDF, and make pages that are nothing but one big picture when they're too lazy to learn good HTML, but the design concepts are still there, even if they fail on implementation.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If you know HTML and CSS really well, all you need to do is learn Photoshop. While its learning curb isn't the smallest, it is really easy to use once you get the hang of it. There are plenty of (free) online tutorials if you Google for them.
To get you started, try out designload.net, they have templates already done, which you can open up in Photoshop and play around with. Once you know how to make pretty navbars and buttons, and can find colors that don't clash with each other, you can go out and make the custom "fancy" web sites that you probably used to drool over.
Stock photos also can give a site the edge you need...if properly placed they can give your sites that "professional" edge.
Security is inversely proportional to the commitment of one desiring to circumvent it.
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
But they're not doing someone else's interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping, and then charging them for the privilege.
You're quite right that basic design knowledge, as with the basics of almost any field, can be learned by someone willing to put a reasonably small but still significant amount of effort into it. It's enough to stop someone getting it Really, Really Wrong(TM).
I'm what you might call an amateur web designer, in that I've spent quite a few hours (hundreds, not half a dozen) over the years exploring things like visual design (colours, alignment, etc.), fluid page design, typography, usability, and so forth. I like to believe that the web sites I've designed, for example a couple I've done for clubs I belong to, have a respectable design and good usability as a result.
However, I wouldn't want to do professional web design. If nothing else, there is obviously a difference between understanding the principles and having enough experience to apply them well in practice. I suspect that difference is the key point the original post was trying to make: people at any firm that's done a lot of back end web design have probably had some exposure to HTML and so on, but if they're smart, they'll know their strengths and limitations, and look for outside help to overcome the limitations.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Honestly? No. Good web design requires a wide range of skills, some general design and some more specific to the medium. It would take you far longer than a month to get to a standard where you could do it professionally, and any course claiming to teach it to you in the format you describe is almost certainly a fraud.
However, the good news is that there are a surprisingly large number of good web sites about various aspects of web design. Rather than giving lots of specific URLs, I'll mention a few keywords to start your searches below. The design community generally links well, so read a few of the top search results, and follow the links from a site you're reading to related sites on similar subjects. You'll find some themes and suggestions recur frequently; those are your basics.
Do you know the basic principles of graphic design -- contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity -- and what they mean? If not, you really need to start here.
Next up, you'll need some knowledge of how to use shape and colour. Subjects you might like to explore include:
Now that you've got some basic graphic design knowledge under your belt, you'll want to know something about typography. This is a complete subject all of its own, but at the very least, you'll need to understand the various aspects of typeface design. As with colour, you'll then need to explore how to choose fonts that work well together, and the emotional response various fonts are going to evoke. It's also important to know about legibility, particularly when you're talking about designing for the screen: a typefact that looks beautiful on paper might be hideously difficult to read on a typical 96dpi computer monitor.
Another basic skill I'd list for a graphic designer looking at web work is fluid design. On paper, you can fix the layout, make sure everything lines up nicely, choose your font sizes and graphic positions. On a web site, you can't (or rather, you probably shouldn't).
Finally, an additional skill that's much over-used but can be helpful is dynamic content, by which I mean things like DHTML, Flash and client-side scripting. As a back-end developer, I'm sure you're aware of the many uses for dynamic content on the server side, but here I'm talking about common things like menu interfaces, guidance when filling in forms, and so on.
Next up, as I'm sure you're aware from your original question, is the issue of usability. Again, this is a bit of a world unto itself: it's not what's easy to look at, it's what's easy to work with. This is perhaps the most under-rated skill of web designers, and is frequently the difference between a showy site and a really good one.
A related issue is accessibility, which is about how easily disadvantaged people such as the blind or partially-sighted can interact with your sight. Again, this is a large topic, though a little common sense and courtesy often goes a long way. Note that there are increasing legal obligations on some site designers in this respect.
Once you've done all of that, you c
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's debatable. His web site used to be pretty good: it featured informative essays on useful subjects, and was something I visited every couple of weeks to check out the new material. Sadly, in the past couple of years, he seems to have degenerated into self-promotional rants with little real content, relying more on links to his previous work than on any new material. His current Alertbox, for example, contains around 20 links, but every one of them is to another NN Group page.
His web site is also, frankly, ugly as hell (not to mention still managing to violate some of his own cherished principles: the search button links to a separate page to enter the search terms, for example). Why does his site have no graphics? Because its design is boring, that's why. If he put as much faith in proper studies of how clients respond as he claims, he'd know that users are prepared to wait a few seconds for a page to load, easily long enough for a few little graphics to download even over a modem. He'd also know that a good design leads the human eye around the page, and that graphics can play a big role in that, while long pieces with lots of headings but no clear structure (like his homepage) are bad for intuitive navigation and scanning.
I'm sorry to dig at someone I once considered enlightened and informative, but you gotta tell it like it is. Ironically, it was Jakob himself who once pointed out that readers dislike clearly unbalanced and self-promoting content on the web, and tend to skip it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The International Webmasters Association/HTML Writers Guild (now one entity) offers some good and inexpensive classes that may be of interest. I've taken a few in the past and been happy with them. They're all done exclusively online.
Since you already have the development knowledge, it sounds like you want to steer towards the classes that teach design principles, (they have one called Design Concepts that sounds exactly like what you want - it covers color, typography, etc. like a some posters have mentioned), graphics creation and manipulation, usability, accessibility, etc. and perhaps pick up some others that teach about contracts and legal issues, promotion, managing projects, etc. if you've never dealt with the business part of things. That way you'll completely round out your skill set.
http://iwa-hwg.eclasses.org
Tip: If you join the organization, you get all classes at half price. You'll make up the $50 right away if you plan to take more than one class.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.