So your client used a WYSIWYG?

The Designers' Sympathy - The Clients' Education
Dear God, if I could provide some of the screen shots from the sites clients brought to me based of their own WYSIWYG website builder! This is both maybe one of the most frustrating and also the most promising situations that arise in my experiences. Two quick experiences I'd like to share.

The first one came with a client I had about 3-4 years ago. He had built a site to promote his product and the site had become so clustered, he finally decided to direct his look and feel to something more "webby". Previous to my re-design, anything that could rotate, blink or flash DID!! Links flashed, stars rotated, etc..

He asked for a re-design for a site that had a lot of good information and alot of bad "webby" stuff. I was excited at the possibilities. At the time I was still somewhat unexperienced myslef and solutions diverted to sites with white text on black backgrounds - you know, to stand apart from everyone else. Both of us had gone in the wroong direction with the best of intentions. In those days well written content, optimization and non-distracting design, unfortunately weren't well-interpeted practices.

My client wanted to present the site well, but in sharing the design process with him, he still requested an appealing site, but hoped I could keep as many of the blinks, flashes and rotating thing-a-ma-doos as I could. I killed them all in the first design. And now that I looked at it I may have moved it from one bad design to another. It was terminated by the client within a couple years. The site was off a reasonable builder if I remember right. And I think they may have even offered some templates.

The other WYSIWYG builder was more of a pain to work in. The website builder converted your files to it's own file extension. I guess this is good for some form of protection against something down the road. When uploaded, the files seemed to save as regular html files. Somehow we got around this after a half a day of trying to figure it out, but it was a painful process.

This particular client didn't have the flashing, rotating or blinking circus pages, but instead had linked extremely large image files that were sized down in the code to his pages. Some of his pages took minutes to load. That's loss of viewers who, like myself, click away after seconds. being that most small clients don't know or don't care to reduce the sizes of images or create thumbnail versions, I had no problem fixing this for him.

To The Clients
So here's one for those who don't want to spend the moeny on a designer now, but hope to later. USE THE TEMPLATES!! They are most likely built correctly by professionals. Look for the templates which are layed out in your desired style and have imagery layed out in your style. The text is easy to update. Ask yourself how much information will YOUR site have. If you go after a template that holds the information/content you think your business will have in five years, keep in mind without all that content it will look empty for five years. Is the time spent searching templates that fit your content and size worth it? Yes, I believe so. Isn't your business worth taking that time?

You can provide the designer with all of your largest images and we'll compress them down for you. Also, if you want a sharp design, don't send poor and pixelated images. Track down or create vector images for logos and artwork specific to your business. Find stock images related to your website and mark the links to these images. I now tell my clients to go to http://www.istockphoto.com and create a lightbox or send me the links. They have cheap images there with high quality.

Web Design - Business Interface Engineering

My most recent project was pro bono (free) work I did for a friend to help him in his career search.

Two positive aspects of the result were the header and the push for a more professional look. Now I'm gonna give my current boss some props ... in our small discussions about sites with a white background versus sites with a colored bg, the white bg in the content area proved a plus. With a simple small site such as this one and a learning experience from previous sites (white text on dark backgrounds and I watched the project dissappear into oblivion), I made a different choice.

The other aspect was the header background graphic - a mistake that turned out better. When doing the background graphic for the header I was going for a simple gradient. In my Photoshop file, I made the image 1 pixel two wide and when I saw the result, it looked better. It added something to it, not sure quite what it was; but it just looked better.

The client liked it and the Google analytics on the site's first day were better than expected. Some of those stats may have been carryover from last night's tweeks, so this next week will tell more. But I can share with the client areas of interest. He had a targeted location where this site was to be primarily viewed from, and although those results didn't show, he made it out of Texas.

The improvement on this project was that I learned I need to get to a design quiker. Although I did work in more of a development process (put the content in and worked the design around the content instead of the other way around), too much time went into finding the right design. I stopeed looking at dozens of templates at one time and just continued to build the site then come back and upgrade the design features to more attractive design.

Here's the remaining pages. All the content, including images within the content, was supplied by the client.

3D Model Treats: Animation, 3D

While studying as a student at ITT Technical Institute, I had the advantage of working with 3D Studio Max for a few years. Below are varous samples from the 3D Collection.

Not too broadcast: Video - Pick 5 (KPXB)

The sister promo to "Customer Profile" was this spot.

Again, Charles Pape was the person that allowed this oppurtunity to edit this, as he was the public affairs producer for the station. I just got to slice-n-dice a little and used two or three provided clips with motion and transparency settings for the background effects.

And using a countdown, I utilized that infamous countdown clip always seen in film. In te end, the sound, voice, script and graphics came together well. The promo aired for a while until the station identity changed.

If I remember right, I may have changed th blue background coolor to a color more in the greener tone for the revisions that came later for a sister station.

Not too broadcast: Video - Customer Profile (KPXB)

After working for KPXB for a few years, I finally got a chance to do a promo. The script, graphics and voice over were provided. I used the graphics with a few layers of moving bars and some stock audio to create the clip which aired for a few years. Charles Pape was the producer and I was grateful for the opportunity he gave me on this.

I enjoyed this project and it seemed a long time waiting. Later on, this script was altered for a sister station and the promos aired over there. Eventually, PAX changed their marketing material and then their identity and the promo was expired.

(After initially uploading the video file, I removed it - to view the promo in full length - send a request through with yuor name and company)

Meanwhile, enjoy the screen shots ...

Until SWF ... Animation - CF Ware

So that whole Starbucks networking system thing does actually happen occasionally. I went to Starbucks and was studying some design and development. I took a ColdFusion book with me and ended up in a conversation with a prospective freelance client.

I was still fairly new to the filed, and think I stay may be in the beginning stages of it now, 3 years later, and I found a few revelations that day. One revelation occured in a conversation about html, and it was that I wasn't as stupid and uneducated as I thought I was. As the conversation continued, the other revelation came to my while my eyes glazed over; I was, maybe, in fact, stupid and uneducated as I thought I was.

And at this time, I was still writing my contact number on the back of other peoples business cards, some how a potential job was created out of this. What the clientr asked for was a simple but sharp animation for his website. Living at my sisters at the time and working on two other projects (my portfolio site and FreakoSuave) and less than a year after getting my degree in multimedia, I was starting to think I had finally arrived. I was busy, but this took priority becuas eof the prospect it could have for future work.

He wanted a lightning effect and the orange lightining was part of his identity so I couldn't alter that or the final location of it above the name. I went for the lightning effect inside the blue sphere which was also a part of the final logo - if I remember right. I ended up creating a simple frame-by-frame animation. The animation was a 10-15 second animation.

I never got the final feedback on the project and upon a follow up later on, he had shut down the website. Who would shut down their website? (My own future had not arrived yet to assist me in my judgement).

As of today, May 29th 2009, whatI have to showcase this is some screenshots. Until I get my portfolio site live again, I couldn't upload SWF's. Or can I? I think most blogger SWF's are linked to an external location. Check back on this later for a live version. In the meantime, here's the screenshots.

Look Ma! Let's put it on the fridge! Websites - Freako Suave

This job came to me during the process of building my portfolio website, so the both of them became a learning experience. The creativity of this site was motiviating, but also frustrating. In the end - I think it became a litle too flashy even for a musicians site.

This site was also released in 2005, but I think only lasted until 2007. The client played on his own and with this band. The updates didn't get posted too often and the site died. Was it because of the site? This is one of those questions I ask for all the projects that fail. I guess if I didn't care, I wouldn't enjoy working in this field, but I did care.

I had worked on another design for this site which was a little more outside the box, and becuase the client was looking for something different and possibly had hopes of self-maintenance on the site, the web design was toned down. But here are the screenshots: