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?"

Comments

Seriously,

[gazbo]

If you want design, go to a designer. Unless you are already highly artistic by nature as well as being a coder, your designs will look shoddy. Not necessarily bad just not polished and professional. Real designers do things like create original artwork, have an instinct about how colours, shapes and navigation can reinforce branding and company strategy...all those intangibles.

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.

Re:Seriously,

[AndyRobinson]

As someone who's run a web design agency for the last five years, I couldn't agree more. It's very tempting to try and offer as wider range of services as possible to clients, but in reality your much better doing a few things well. That way you'll establish a great track record, have happy clients, get recommended to people, etc.

The danger of diversifying into too many things is that you end up being a jack of all trades but a master of none, and are going to find it very difficult to differentiate yourself from all the other wannabe web designers out there. At that point you run the risk of competing on price against all the college kids who are doing sites from their bedrooms. That, quite frankly, is a mugs game.

By the sounds of it you currently have good, strong coding skills and create professional backends for sites. Play to that strength.

My advice would be to play to that strength and partner with a designer or design-led web company. They'll have a complementary problem to you - they'll be able to design great looking sites, but when it comes to backend functionality they'll be stuffed.

By joining forces you can both benefit and attract bigger clients, more interesting projects, etc. Sure you'll have to split the profits, but the end result will be that your both making more money and producing better sites.

Re:Seriously,

[ajagci]

If you want design, go to a designer. Unless you are already highly artistic by nature as well as being a coder, your designs will look shoddy.

Yeah, and we all should go to interior decorators to have our houses decorated, professional cleaning companies to have our bathrooms cleaned, and professional shoppers to do the shopping for us.

Back in the real world, real people have to do interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping themselves. And they also have to do design themselves because they can't charge it to someone else.

Fortunately, contrary to what you claim, basic design isn't hard: color harmony, typography, and layout follow basic rules and you can use a cookbook if you really can't figure it out yourself.

Real designers do things like create original artwork, have an instinct about how colours, shapes and navigation can reinforce branding and company strategy...all those intangibles.

Yes, real designers often create web sites that load slowly, look confusing, and are hard to navigate. And, as a customer, I don't want "reinforced branding strategies", I want information, and if I don't get it quickly and with minimum hassle, any reinforcement will be negative. KISS is a good principle for web site design, and it's not hard to master (except, perhaps, for some overly trained designers).

Re:Seriously,

[secolactico]

Yeah, and we all should go to interior decorators to have our houses decorated, professional cleaning companies to have our bathrooms cleaned, and professional shoppers to do the shopping for us

I think you missed the point big time.

I can decorate my own home, but if my place of business is part of the image I project to my customers, I'll hire professional help.

If my web site is a form of revenue, I'll try to get as much edge as I can from my competitors, and that will most likely mean hire someone who can do more that just color coordination.

The Inmates are Running

[kinema]

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.

Re:The Inmates are Running

[NanoGator]

"Usability engineering is something separate from both graphic presentation and back-end nuts and bolts design."

Actually it's not all that seperate. Part of art (specifically, animation) is about learning to communicate with your audience. Those skills carry over into designing a good site. The real problem isn't so much that they're incapable of designing a good UI, they're just not so aware that they don't need to use every single tool in their toolbox. Early on, it's hard to stay simple when you have so much you want to show.

Some R eading

[elmegil]

Don't Make me Think by Steve Krug.

Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't agree more with you: if you want "professionally" designed websites, hire professional designers. That being said, small clients often can't handle the price point involved in having a team of people doing their site. I work as part of a 2-person design team, and as such I work with an array of highly tallented backend guys, and while they know better then to try their luck designing high-budget projects, they all "provide full-service web site development," meaning do design for small clients who can't afford more. So here's the tips I would give:

• Ignore Jacob Nielson. Useit.com is eminently usable, yes, but it's also unbelievably ugly. There is NOTHING professional about that.
  
• Borrow ideas if you get lost, but don't borrow ideas from the wrong places. Examples of what not to borrow include: websites made before 1997, your OS, Slashdot, TemplateMonster. Exampels of what to borrow include: Art Deco advertising, Mondrian, Bauhaus, threeOh.
  
• Don't fear flat colors and simple type. Minimalism is the hardest thing to design well, but often the best designs are minimalist.
  
• Don't fear images. HTML text looks terrible under Windows and using images for all your header and subheader text can really make a design snap.
  
• If you'd never call yourself a filmmaker or an animator, you shouldn't make Flash intros. Motion graphics are a whole new world mastered by very few, and if you're going to force every viewer to watch a few seconds of animation, it really needs to be good. That initial impression of the site is key. Besides, is there really anything in that intro that is best conveyed in that manner?
  
• Beware of using a typeface that came with your OS for titles. The idea is to create something unique, right? Also be sparing with decerative typefaces.
  
• Find the theme. If you think about a project in those terms, the result is sure to look less off-the-shelf.
  
• Realize when you need a designer. The fact that I can throw down some HTML in /. posts doesn't make me want to code a ColdFusion backend, why would the fact that you can make buttons in Photoshop make you want to art direct a $100,000 web project? Design is a specialty like any other: it's good to be able to do it, but best to be able to do it and know when you need professional help.

Re:Take an art course

[Just Some Guy]

The best website design houses are staffed not with computer programmers, but with folks with degrees in art.

No. The best houses are staffed by artists and technical types that can render the artists' vision in standard-compliant glory. The worst houses are the ones filled with brilliant artists who can't be made to understand the realities of the web as a medium, and who crank out design after design that is absolutely beautiful on IE 6 at 1024x768 but looks like a top-right-corner blob on Mozilla at high resolutions.

An artist's eye is very important for developing an aesthetically pleasing site, but a technician's touch is absolutely critical if you want the whole world to be able to use it. This isn't a slam on artists; to the contrary, I'm a good technical designer, but my sites are specification-perfect yet boring. I just want to reinforce the idea that you need both types of skills to make good looking, functional sites. An artist or a technician alone will only get you halfway there.