When I first started creating web sites the term for people who did this type of work were called “Webmasters.” I will say this: not many of us were masters at anything related to the web at that point. Remember, Alta Vista and Geocities were the big names back then and most people were using dial-up connections. After some time the term “Webmaster” lost its luster and we were deemed “Web Producers.” A much more fitting (and cool) name. No longer did we sound like we were cast-offs from Dungeon’s and Dragon’s, we were now “producers!” And wouldn’t you know it, some years later the name was changed yet again. Now we are Front End Developers.

In today’s tech world there are two types of developers: front end and back end. Do the two ever intertwine? Absolutely. Is it encouraged? Why not? The more you know the better your skills are. So what exactly is the difference between what a front end and back end developer might do? I am glad you asked. I won’t get too technical on you here, I try to explain things like this as if I were talking to my grandmother. How about a basic analogy:

A Front End Developer is the person in the auto shop that builds the chassis of your car. Everything you actually SEE with your eyes: the doors, the hood, the bumpers, the paint job, the wheels, etc. A Back End Developer is the mechanic that builds the engine that runs the car. In other words, the stuff you don’t usually see. When you visit a web page and see the pretty graphics on top, the navigation to the left, and the content in the middle, it is the front end developer that writes the code that presents that layout to you. If you do a search, submit an inquiry through a form, try to book a hotel room, or make an online payment, more than likely it was a back end developer that built the code that enables that to work.

As we move forward there seems to be a trend leading towards creating the all-in-one developer, a Jack-of-All-Trades: Someone who can design and build a web site while also being able to make all the fancy bells and whistles work. There are designers who now write basic CSS/HTML code, just as there are front end developers who are learning how to use jQuery and Javascript in new and fascinating ways. If there is one thing the wondering worldwide web has taught us it is that what is hot today might not be tomorrow. The internet goes through quicker fads than a teenager. If you don’t believe me then shoot me an email in about five years so we can discuss what ever happened to Facebook.

They have for a long time (and for a lot of reasons), so let’s get over the talk about whether content should appear above or below the “fold”.

The fold people are talking about comes from a dying, dead tree-based technology, i.e., newspapers. News above the fold, i.e., the top half of the front page of the newspaper, was considered more important than news below the fold.

We’re not doing newspapers anymore.

No question, early eye tracking studies like this one showed two things:

1. The natural preference of English-speaking peoples to read from top to bottom and left to right, which led to the “F” rules.

2. Content that appears below the first screen (there’s that below the fold thing) was rarely seen because early Web users did NOT scroll.

Well, they scroll now. Blogs taught them that. Smartphones with tiny screens and long lists of options taught digital screen users how easy it is to scroll.

One of our favorite usability experts, Jakob Nielsen, gave his blessing to scrolling more than a year ago based on his research and eye tracking.

That said, The Most Critical Information should still appear at the top. That’s common sense, not Web site design.

Second, home pages and section pages ARE different from secondary pages, which tend to (and should) be devoted to single topics and greater detail. That’s where scrolling is more likely to occur.

So, let it go. It’s OK to scroll.

Right?

A collection of inspiring photography, Web design, illustrations, website architecture and online images, Five Minutes Daily shares the Web’s most interesting imagery from the perspective of the IWS creative team.

Yeah, it’s got examples of our own design work, but we are casting our net wide to show off stuff that we think is cool, cutting-edge and creative.

Get your daily dose of inspiration; visit FiveMinutesDaily.com!

Check out these articles from Eyetools – the inventors of eyetracking heatmaps, experts in eyetracking analysis – for some of the reasons why.

The site is called OneMinuteNews, and it’s a new news site for Gen-Xers. It’s got a clean design with clearly labeled content buckets – trending news, technology, entertainment, etc. Content appears in text and video. Social media features are being added.

The news is aimed at a young market and has a youthful feel and spin to it. Who knows whether it will make it? Disclaimer: It’s not a client, and IWS has no connection with it. We just believe in highlighting good work whether it’s ours or not.

OneMinuteNews is a good example of what online communication should be. It knows its audience. It gives the audience content that it would find useful and in a language and format that the audience gets.

That’s what we try to do, too. End of story.

I know what people expect me to write. There’s this running assumption in the office that I’m some sort of pirate.  Yes, I wear a lot of stripes, anchor-patterned shorts, and on Wednesday and Thursday, I carry a fun-size bottle of rum in my boots.

But the only thing I constantly pillage and plunder is my checking account, and I limit eye-patch wearing to the privacy of my living room.

The most compelling reason why this pirate assumption has spread is because right before I joined the team, I spent several months on board an old-school sailboat. I’ve tried to use proper technical terms to describe the boat — a brigantine, a square-rigged vessel, but the response is always the same:

“Oh, like a pirate boat?”

Yes, like a pirate boat.

So what is a Web Designer doing on a pirate boat? I guarantee you I did not do an iota of Web Design while helping run, maintain and navigate a sail boat with 29 other people from the Dominican Republic to Jamaica and more.

I was part of a program from Sea Education Association, in which students learn nautical science, oceanography, environmental science and cultural studies, to name a few.

Have I come out of that experience as a better designer? Of course.

Maybe I didn’t have coding sessions on the quarterdeck, but design is an art that encompasses much more than knowing how to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver.  Designers still have to work as a team, communicate successfully and find inspiration. And I did all those, repeatedly, almost constantly, for months.

Sometimes communication was a life and death matter.  If someone was not paying attention to their job, it could’ve cause catastrophic consequences. The SEA Program instills in students a sense of ultimate responsibility that many of them have never experienced. There was a sense that your decisions were so important that there was no option but to get them right. And while that might sound harsh, sometimes in the working world, that’s the sort of pressure people deal with.

A Web Designer is not an island, pun intended.

I find it helpful and necessary to step aside from the giant 28-inch monitor, and go do and live adventures that seem unrelated, sometimes if only for the inspiration, memories and friends you might find along the way.

If you use an image to replace those headlines, it hurts the site as far as the SEO goes, right?. Wrong. Using CSS there are plenty of ways to keep the markup for the web crawlers, and the viewer will still see the design with the correct font face. To do this, you just us a simple image replacement technique with CSS, probably ten different ways to do it. These techniques work great, but what happens when your client asks you to change that headline to something else? You have to then go back to Photoshop, edit that piece of text, re-save the image, and then update your CSS with the new image name. Sounds like a lot of work to change one line of text right?

Allow me to introduce my new friend, Cufón. Cufón is a JavaScript library that renders a font file into a script that allows you to replace HTML elements on a page with that specific font file. Pretty slick right? Now when your client asks you to change the text in a headline, you only have to change it in the HTML, instead doing all of that other work!

So, whats the browser compatibility? The good news is that it works in IE6. Need I say more? And, yes the standards too (Firefox, Safari, Chrome). You can see a full list here.

One more note worth pointing out is that if the user has JavaScript turned off for some reason, then they wouldn’t see the pretty font face, but they would still see the heading on the page. So for the next project you get, don’t stress because your designer used non-web safe fonts, go ahead and try it out — it’s easy to implement into any site. You can “see” Cufón in action at The Visual Click, or over at Press75.

Do you have any secrets to add or other pieces of advice? I would love to hear your thoughts.

The fact is, our clients often need work done quickly and efficiently, all the while having very specific target markets in mind. It’s the designers job to meet the needs of the client and instantly adapt to their brand. Especially if there is no brand. Take web design for example. Sure, we as designers all have our standard bag of tricks, our own styles of the trade, but at the end of the day, we have the same job to do. Goals to meet. A few of those goals would be to simply get your website in front of the right people, usually lots of them and then have them think or act certain way. Its our job to take control, guiding them through this online experience, until some sort of fulfillment is met. Oh yeah, what are we trying to achieve again?. Is your target market buying something? Maybe you need to them to register, leave their email address, donate, sign up or just plan be informed. All these things play a role in how you design.

For some designers a struggle is trying to find a balance between being a creative and having to design within the rules of the web. Most will tell you that web design is enjoyable for its interactivity and seemingly endless pool of design options. Web design provides many opportunities for one to be creative, especially with the tools we have today. However, over the years standards have been set and the bending of the rules has become harder and harder. For example, navigating websites is usually done by clicking buttons spanning in a row, left to right, usually somewhere near the top of a page. Another common layout of course would be to run the navigation points down the left hand side of a webpage. But those are your only options for a typical professional website. Why, you ask?  Because it makes sense. Ford Motor Company isn’t going to release the next Fusion model with the steering wheel in the back seat, are they? Just like cnn.com isn’t going to launch their new site with the main navigation crammed somewhere near the bottom of the page. Get it?

But what if you want to? What if you want to try something new? Most designers didn’t get into this business to keep adding to the great pool of mediocrity. No way. There isn’t one designer out there who wants to produce work that’s just okay. After all, we’re all just a bunch of showoffs who want to produce web sites that impress, making our clients say that great three-letter-word: “Wow!” Hey, we paid good money to go to that fancy art school and now we want to create the sort of designs that earn us a good reputation among clients AND other designers.

Unfortunately sometimes getting too creative is a tough sell in the business of web design. Believe me. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room to showcase or express your design abilities. Its up to us to balance the rules of the web and our creative minds by finding new ways to achieve the client’s goals. I feel it is important to break out of that standard bag of tricks as long as you can remember to never let your finger too far off the pulse of what matters most. Good effective design or our company’s flashy portfolio?

Photo: juhansonin