When Looking For a Website Designer
By Astrit Kita • May 1st, 2008 • Category: Another Night Shift, Blogging TipsJust a few months ago who would actually care about having a personal look and feel of his or her own blog? When people would talk about web design mainly it was referred to the design of a website and not a blog.
Actually even many corporations would use one of those free wordpress themes for their companies blog with just some slight modifications…and just few months ago BOOM everyone was lurking for a personalized wordpress blog theme. Everyone wanted to stand out from the rest of the fellow bloggers with a unique design that would reflect to their personality.
I have been thinking now and then to get a new blog design for this make money online blog but I just feel really comfortable enough with the current layout I am using (yeah, it is a free wordpress theme so what?) that I don’t even find the hassle to sit down and open photoshop and design me a new layout.
It makes sense tho to hire a company for your website design even tho sometimes prices are just too high, especially if you think that return on investment won’t be that good. Speaking of this I ended up seeing the website designing page of Hosterio.com.
I have to admit I like their layout, actually I love simplicity, even tho they are a hosting company actually they also offer website design services too. The first thing that caught my eyes was their pleasant design, so Ok i thought, it is worth reading maybe I get convinced and hire them to do the work for my lazy self (some times it is harder to design for yourself if you are a designer, rather then designing for a customer).
The page looked nice, well written content and most important the price was really cheap, I quote from their own website
Our website design services starts from as low as USD249 only. With that package you will get a complete website of upto 10 pages with free domain name and web hosting
Intrigued me, it does intrigue you too right? So what should stop me for hiring them? Well there is one thing that stops me from hiring, actually it stops many, I presume, from hiring a website design firm to work on your personal website design if they don’t have a portfolio show case from where I could see the quality of their work (let me remind you, their site already looks nice..but one example is just not enough).
That was the first thing I did notice, the second, being a semantic code maniac, i checked the source code. I think I will better refrain my comments, after all very few are the sites that satisfy me from how the layout is structured and how the elements are being used, but I can’t stop myself repeating to everyone that tables are meant to be used for displaying tabular data, and not structuring the websites layout.
From that, I can tell that there are few things people should and do look at when they are thinking about hiring a website design firm or even a website designer as freelancer, let me name them
- Companies Design
- Read the whole sales letter, it will help you understand a lot about how serious they are.
- Portfolio of previous work, this is a must and inspires/convinced people to hire you even more
- Code structure. Using semantic correct markup? Is the code search engine friendly?
However, I hope the folks at Hosterio.com will read this blog post and will take their time to build a nice portfolio showcase.
“but I can’t stop myself repeating to everyone that tables are meant to be used for displaying tabular data, and not structuring the websites layout.”
That is not an accepted standard, that is your opinion. You may dislike tables immensely but they get the job done. They handle relative positioning better than any DIV or SPAN could ever hope to. Also they have one thing modern CSS DIV layouts just don’t have, compatibility. Both backwards and sideways. That means a wider audience. And in the end it’s all about getting the most people to read your content.
Me personally, I can go DIVs or TABLEs. DIVs really work best with absolute positioned stuff, otherwise it’s a brawl to get it to work right.
Also the talk of how TABLEs load slower just doesn’t bare out in practice.
But hey, that’s just my 2 cents. Personally I think both options have serious deficiencies.
Hey Jason,
You might be right about the fact that what I just wrote is my personal opinion. However each element in HTML is meant to be with a purpose. Lets take for example regular listing and irregular listing. Regular listing can be used when you want to count points in a regular basis (i.e. first, second, third etc), while irregular does not have the numbers attached to it so the line up of the content does not matter.
Now, we also have tabular data. Lets take for example a website that has several products, classified on several packages which also differ in price. It would make sense that the webmaster of that site organizes the products information’s/package in a table (as they are actually a tabular data).
To get back to the fact that tables do their job, I don’t contradict you on that (and doubt anyone would). It is true that most browser do perfectly read the tables.
As far as it regards the loading speed of a website with tables and one with div, I would say make a test, the difference will be in few milliseconds, but its still there.
Thanks for passing by Jason
it is always a pleasure to read insightful comments.
P.S. Beautiful portfolio you have there.