Web Developer

maleficent said:
one of the suggestions I'm not sure I made or not... check out other sites in your market and even really just other websites and find layouts or functionality that you like - you think is cool and maybe would want to have - and especially stuff you hate... communicating with some tech people (like me) it's a lot easier to use visuals than trying to explain what you are after...
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The thing is, I didn't see a whole lot that I like out there.

While we certainly want to make money with the website, it's more of a passion for each of us and it won't be our primary source of income. That said, the LAST thing we want it to be is a giant pitch for our training services. That will be the backbone of the site and what we spend much of our time doing.

But more importantly, we want it to be a resource too.

And an active forum.

I'll give more concrete visuals once we have a few meetings. Right now we are having trouble meeting consistently, and when we do meet, we start talking training theory and before we know it, 3 hours passed and no work was done on paper for the site.

Hopefully this Monday is different.
 
not seeing stuff you like is a good start... what you don't want is just as important as you do want... but you know that...

and when we do meet, we start talking training theory and before we know it, 3 hours passed and no work was done on paper for the site.
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that says a lot about what the quality of the site will be.. you guys both get excited about what you want to offer... when you're that excited, it gets hard to get it down on paper.. a good web developer should be able to ask you the right questions about what your site should be and give you a starting point.

web sites tend to be moving targets - it's what makes them fun... so you don't have to be stuck with your initial output.. it can always be changed...

And an active forum.
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those take time to build... but i have faith in you..
 
One last thing to throw in... if you don't have a sketch on paper with what you want your site to look like as far as layout and you're not a very creative person to be able to explain what you want, go to TemplateMonster.com. Copy links to site layouts you like and jot down notes below with the aspects of each that you like. This will help you when sitting down with a designer to better help them understand what you're looking for.

Too often I get people telling me they want a website with a menu and a place to put copy. That's all they know. Instead of me creating a few examples, it's easier for me to send them to that site to look for some ideas. It can be as simple as "I like how the menu is on this template, but would rather make it horizontal and in this position, etc".

Hope that helps as well with designing your layout.
 
anytime I can help you let me know,

and if your interested, I would love to do this project with you and be the designer and programmer for it

PM if your interested and I can get you my info
 
Thanks so much everyone. It means more than you know. I feel so much more comfortable than I did 2 days ago.

I'll keep you posted.
 
Heya Steve
Sorry i only just saw this thread now ... Im a web developer! :D

No im not trying to sell you a site but i sure can give you good advice.
Use word of mouth a lot if you can, and i dont mean just one person - find out from as many people as you can and look at your competitions stuff to find out what you like.

As far as design/development. Always have a seperate designer and developer - but make sure they are friendly with each other because what a designer can do isnt always what a developer can and there will be some changes to be made to final design.

As for layout - make sure you use as "regular" layout as possible. If you use a similar style to most major website formats people will find the site a lot easier to use and navigate (ie 2-3 columns, menu down the left, header at the top).
Although your colours might be really cool - when it comes to a website you want to keep things as professional as possible. A website with a black background rarely looks as cool to people trying to read it as one with a white one. Make sure the fonts scale up and down so people with eyesight problems can also read it (dont use px size, use em ... web developer should know what this means). Fonts shouldnt be too small either.

Make sure your website works in both firefox AND IE. Mac And Windows and anything else.

Give your website a line spacing/height more than usual makes it easier to read. People naturally read downwards easier than sideways. Using thinner and more columns makes people more inclined to read things (ie newspaper column style). Break up larger blocks of text.

Your website should idealy be editable by you without you having to know any html code or programming language. It should have some sort of content management backend so you can update it. Update it as much as you can - google likes that :)

I cant think of anything else offhand atm - i think its time for the morning coffee (7am here)
 
Oh yeah, and not trying to advertise where i work or anything, check out the info here for some nice advice. It explains a lot of it better than i can.
 
Steve,
I've kind of skimmed all the advice you've gotten here, so forgive me if I repeat anything. Also, bear in mind that although I done a few sites, this is not my main profession. I make my living as a Java Enterprise application developer, and in that context, I write systems that enable web interfaces through interaction with Oracle databases.

That said, here are my initial observations.

1) Ask to see some sites the developers have done. Go there when your candidates are not with you and take a close look. Do the sites have instant visual appeal? Do you have an intuitive sense of how to make them work? Do they have multiple ways of achieving the same thing? Are they well laid out?

2) Look at the sites in both Microsoft IE and Firefox. Do the sites work in one browser and not the other. If that's the case, this is a sloppy designer.

3) Right click on the site's page and click on "view source." Take a look at the code. You don't have to know a thing about html to do this. Just visually inspect the code. Does it look neat and cleanly laid out? If not, beware. The developers may be using a code generator program and while they may know how to use the program, when they turn it over to you, it could be a disaster. Look at a few pages, not just the home page. This is kind of like looking at someone's form in the gym. You may not know how to do a proper squat, but when someone goes down 2 inches, you have a feeling it's not right.

4) While you're looking at the source code, take a look at the top of the page and look for a tag called meta name="description" and also one called meta name="keywords". Do you see lots and lots of repetition of the same words? If you do, that's an indication that the developers don't know very much about search engine optimization. They still mistakenly believe that stuff like this has a beneficial effect on search engine placement, when exactly the opposite is true.

5) Again on the source, at the top of the page, look for something that says link href="ZZZZ.css" rel="stylesheet" , where "ZZZZ" is the name of their stylesheet. Again, you don't have to know how css works, but you want to make sure your developer does. If their sites don't use stylesheets, stay away. If you see the "table" tag littered throughout the text, watch out! These are developers who don't really know how to use css to lay out a page.

Now some things that are independent of the developer. . .

6) Think of a visual look and feel that will "brand" every page as your own.

7) Develop a color scheme (two or three colors) that you like and go together well.

8) Make a layout of your site on paper, just using crude sketches. Spread it all out on the floor and see if it all holds together.

9) I think Flash has its place in certain areas, but in general I would stay away from it. Your first version can be in straight html/css.

And some last minute thoughts. . .

10) It sounds like you will be wanting a database. Make sure your developer knows PHP and has developed sites using PHP before.

11) Find out exactly how the site will be admin'd and who will do it, and how much that will cost.
 
Wow, awesome advice Tom. Thanks sooooo much!

We discussed admin responsibilities a little here. What are your opinions of the interfaces that allow you to make changes on your own? Things like dreamweaver and the like?

With the way this site is going to be, at least the way I want it to be, there are many parts of it that I'm going to want to add to and modify on a regular basis. I can't imagine having to go through someone else every time I want to add an article, change a picture, etc.
 
steve i understand your want to do it yourself

but think of it this way

do you go to a lawyer to get some information and then take the case on by yourself? so if you wouldnt do your own lawyer work

then why would you want to do your own web work.
web designers and developers go to schools for this and have the knoweldge of how to do it and how to do it right, if you take the responsibility on yourself I can guarantee you will mess up the code one day and pay a lot for them to fix it.

were trained in this. let the web ppl do it ;)
 
the main part of the web site should be left to the designer, however updating content he should be able to do on the fly... like if he wanted to put up a new article a day...
 
Steve said:
Wow, awesome advice Tom. Thanks sooooo much!

We discussed admin responsibilities a little here. What are your opinions of the interfaces that allow you to make changes on your own? Things like dreamweaver and the like?

With the way this site is going to be, at least the way I want it to be, there are many parts of it that I'm going to want to add to and modify on a regular basis. I can't imagine having to go through someone else every time I want to add an article, change a picture, etc.
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Dreamweaver:web development :: personal trainers:fitness

In other words, there are some good sites developed in Dreamweaver, but not many. One of the problems with the code generators is that they let developers create a) atrocious code; and b) sites that can only reasonably be maintained with the right version of the software that created it.

Your second question, about adding and modifying on a regular basis, is where PHP comes in. Basically, you want that part of your site to read from a database, in such a way that you are completely independent of the developer. In other words, it would work just like this forum, where the users can create new content without the intervention of an admin.

This relates to the paper layout of your site. Clearly mark the portions of the site that you want to be "content managed". That way, when the site is laid out, there won't be a lot of rework to build that in.

Since you will undoubtedly be working with images and video, make sure the developer has experience storing and retrieving those media types in a MySql database (MySql is probably the database your developer would use, since it's free, and most ISP's offer it free of charge as well).

One other thing that I just realized:
Today, as you've probably noticed, WLF is extremely unstable. You need to review with your developer what happens when situations like that crop up.

And one other, more technical, item: Ask the developer about the dangers of sql injection. I don't expect you to understand the answer, but if the answer is that it's not a concern, you need to watch out. This link explains more about it than you would ever want to know. But the basic idea is that since you are going to have a public site with a backend database, you want to make sure you can't get hacked. There are certainly other ways to hack a site, but sql injection is one of the most common and most dangerous.
 
the instability of WLF is usually related to the host...

Should/would the web developer be the provider of hosting space (including or not including domain registration) or do they do that seperately?

and there are options you've got there as well - another forum I'm on -the site owner, owns the servers that the forums are hosted on - they are just kept at a hosting facility where he's got VPN access to the boxes other forums use services that offer XX amount of space on their servers and charge for that accordingly..
 
JeremyRice said:
steve i understand your want to do it yourself

but think of it this way

do you go to a lawyer to get some information and then take the case on by yourself? so if you wouldnt do your own lawyer work

then why would you want to do your own web work.
web designers and developers go to schools for this and have the knoweldge of how to do it and how to do it right, if you take the responsibility on yourself I can guarantee you will mess up the code one day and pay a lot for them to fix it.

were trained in this. let the web ppl do it ;)
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I think you misunderstood me.

I don't want anything to do with the design of the website.

On the flipside, I don't want to have to go through someone each time I want to update the content of my site, have it be articles or the like. If that's the case, I'd rather not even bother with the headache of running my own site, truthfully. I'm doing this primarily for fun. Of course I'd love to make a business out of it. However, the truth of the matter is, as soon as this becomes a headache for me is the moment it stops.
 
Tom, again, invaluable advice. I'm drafting up my list of questions for the developer.
 
maleficent said:
the instability of WLF is usually related to the host...

Should/would the web developer be the provider of hosting space (including or not including domain registration) or do they do that seperately?

and there are options you've got there as well - another forum I'm on -the site owner, owns the servers that the forums are hosted on - they are just kept at a hosting facility where he's got VPN access to the boxes other forums use services that offer XX amount of space on their servers and charge for that accordingly..
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Good question. Is that something I should ask the developer? I'd think I should have an idea before hand about the answer.
 
I think the answer to that is going to come down to cost.

Buying a server and having it hosted somewhere isn't cheap... it's a lot less expensive start up wise to use someone else's space and just make sure you have enough bandwith...

I'm not sure if the developer would be able to answer that but she\he'd be able to give you some options I'd hope
 
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