Generator blog

I once made most of my money designing print materials. CD packages, book covers, print ads, posters and fliers. Occasionally clients would ask me to do things out of the box, but usually those things tied directly into print products they had already designed and simply needed reconfigured.

About three years ago, I started seeing the handwriting on the wall for the print world. The most obvious sign was when we did our taxes that year and discovered that our income on marking up print went to almost nothing. I was also a partner in a sports web community with network titan Rivals.com, a network that uses a massive content management system that makes millions without creating a physical product. Hey, if you can make money on a web site that is solely dedicated to promoting Vanderbilt football — the only private school in the cheat-at-all-costs Southeastern Conference — you can make money at anything.

When I started delving into Web design, what looked the same as print was suddenly and obviously totally different. After slogging it through learning Dreamweaver, HTML and Flash, I’ve discovered why the two worlds are so different, and why you have to pay a premium to have a great Web site.

1. In Print, the software does all the code work. Most Web designers who never worked in print think there’s no code in print, but they are wrong. Quark and Photoshop write millions of lines of code for any print package design, you just don’t get access to it. Print, for decades, has essentially been the same process repeated over and over again. Software programs created for print design were therefore able to (relatively) quickly figure out how to do what we need while keeping the code off of our grubby hands. On the Web, things are changing so quickly that even Adobe can’t keep up with the demand. So, that means the only way even great programs like Dreamweaver can give designers what they need is to allow them to alter the code by hand.

Eventually I believe this will go away. It’s inevitable. Designers don’t want to write code any more than you do. Right now, though, the only way you can create a good Web site is to know HTML.

2. In the Web, there are no standards. Okay, that’s not true, and increasingly less so of late. But in Web design you must always accommodate:

1. Three operating systems (Mac, Windows and Linux);
2. At least three browsers (Firefox, Safari and Explorer) which look different on each OS;
3. A variety of monitor screen sizes;
4. A variety of Internet connection speeds (DSL down to dial-up); and,
5. At least four main server operating systems (ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion, Ruby on Rails).

Imagine if a CD package could be in three different sizes, printed on five different kinds of paper, and the music had to be saved in a way that would play on four different kinds of CD players! That’s what the Web is right now — a mess for all.

3. Microsoft sucks. Unbeknownst to most, Microsoft’s Explorer web browser is the single worst thing to ever happen to the Web. We designers must hand write all sorts of code into every HTML page to fix things that Explorer does wrong. And by wrong, I mean things that totally violate web standards that every other browser does right. Because most people use Windows, and therefore use a PC, and therefore often know nothing about the Web, they unknowingly use Explorer as their default web browser.

Note: Microsoft is no longer developing Explorer for the Mac. Do not even attempt to use Explorer if you have a Macintosh computer. Explorer for Mac has not been updated for five years, and that’s 500 years on the Web. Furthermore, when Safari and FireFox came out and were free, and customers refused to not block ads that came into their browser, Bill Gates realized there was no good rea$on to invest in developing Explorer.

My word of advice to you: Use FireFox. It’s the best, most secure and most updated browser out there, it’s free, and it is being constantly updated. Yes, Safari is good too, but FireFox runs the same on both the Mac and Windows. Use it and all good web sites will work great.

4. It’s interactive. A web site is increasingly less about pretty pictures, and more about user interaction. When Web sites were online brochures, they displayed text and pictures just as a magazine ad would. But when Web sites became interactive, everything got exponentially more complex.

Think about it this way: Print versus the Web is like comparing a color-by-number painting to a Rubics Cube. The painting may look good even if you change some of the colors; The Rubics Cube only looks good if every single dimension of the puzzle works together. If one thing doesn’t work, everything else doesn’t work.

5. The education gap. Clients understand print; They mostly don’t know jack about the Web. The gap between what even smart clients know and what is really going on is massive, and in many ways getting greater. That makes it very difficult for folks like us to estimate jobs and charge what it’s worth. Many times, what is easy, fast and cheap in print costs a ton on the Web. But we talk in a language they don’t understand, so their defenses are up. And, most of them have been burned by Web designers who took advantage of their ignorance and charged them for sites that never worked right.