Poor Webmaster Personal Sites

[Els]

ROTFLMAO

And that's another bodypart you'll have to go looking for...
;-)

 

[Stephen Horrillo]

3. JACK OF ALL TRADES - these guys are fairly competent coders and also
have reasonable artistic abilities too. They're by no means an expert in
either, but they know enough about each subject to get by un-aided, and
even take time out to offer help and advice to others.

Number 3 is a very rare beast indeed. There are a few in this newsgroup,
but on the whole, you're probably most likely to meet Number 1 in this
group...
That's not a criticism of anyones skills or abilities. It's just an
observation that great designers rarely make great coders, and great
coders rarely make great designers....

In simple terms, different people have completely different skill-sets...

I guess I'm not advanced enough to understand the importance of coding or am
just a practical person. I test my site on my three computers. One's an OLD
laptop running Win98, a Pentium 3 running win2k with a crummy CRT 800X600
monitor, and a P4 running XP with a nice 19" Planar monitor. I look at it in
Netscape, IE and Opera. The dialup and DSL. If it works and looks good on
all of them well, I figure it will work for the vast majority of computers
out there. I'm sure you can spend a lifetime keeping it error free but
what's the use if in practice it works? Am I thinking wrong?

--
Warmest regards,

Stephen Horrillo, Realtor / C.Ht.
For MLS & Computer Training: http://www.BrokerAgentTraining.com
Realtors Earn Over 100% at EXIT: http://www.over100percent.com

 

[mbstevens]

Why is it that the Web
Designers on these groups have such amateurish personal
(and professional) websites....

Perhaps Horrillo is only talking about the 'artistic' side
of web design. The amount of talk about 'amateruism' and
'professionalism' in a field often bears an inverse
relationship to the amount of real knowledge required to
work in the field. It is often used when the arguer has
no hard information or clear thought about the field.

Look at a programming newsgroup; the words seldom crop
up. Instead, the talk is about the correct or incorrect
way to do things. Go to an art or craft newsgroup, and
the referencecs to professionalism are constant.

I suggest Horrillo look carefully at what makes him make
his statement to see if there is a way to pull hard
information from his own intentions. He may lack the
vocabulary to make coherent statements about the
'artistic' side of web design.

 

[Eric Jarvis]

There's something that's been bothering me and I hope it's not taken the
wrong way. Why is it that the Web Designers on these groups have such
amateurish personal (and professional) websites. They sound so knowledgeable
in what they say but most sites look like a 10 year old designed them. Is it
because they're working so hard on other people's sites they neglect their
own? Sort of like the gourmet chef that eats TV dinner when he gets home
from work. I've known some maids and house cleaners whose home's were as
dirty as can be. Is it that sort of syndrome of are these people just full
of it?

In my case it's because nobody is paying me to build my personal site.
It's for no purpose other than to give me easy access to my bookmarks in a
form that allows me to easily point other people to useful stuff. So it's
extremely simple and designed solely for my convenience.

 

[William Tasso]

...
I test my site on my three computers. One's an OLD
laptop running Win98, a Pentium 3 running win2k with a crummy CRT 800X600
monitor, and a P4 running XP with a nice 19" Planar monitor. I look at
it in
Netscape, IE and Opera. The dialup and DSL. If it works and looks good on

keep in mind that 'works' and 'looks good' are different attributes. The
former is universally achievable, unfortunately the latter is universally
unattainable.

all of them well, I figure it will work for the vast majority of
computers out there.

The 'vast majority' has no reliably defined/quantified value so I'm afraid
is meaningless in this context.

I'm sure you can spend a lifetime keeping it error free but
what's the use if in practice it works? Am I thinking wrong?

Right idea although the method could do with improvement im(ns)ho.

Start with valid (trivial works for me) markup and your test/verify
process will be much easier to manage.

 

[Eric Jarvis]

In my opinion, you get three distinct kinds of webmaster....

1. CODERS

2. DESIGNERS

3. JACK OF ALL TRADES

4. Marketeting people

That's me. I suspect it may be Charles too.

 

[scorpion53061]

Do you like my site"

http://www.jerichoband.net ?

 

[mbstevens]

Do you like my site"

http://www.jerichoband.net ?

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Do you like my site"

http://www.jerichoband.net ?

Not particularly. Completely unnavigable when JavaScript is disabled.
(Which means that the Googlebot can't index it.) I was not able to get
beyond the first page.

Your "slide show" tells me "Since your web browser does not support
JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:",
and then shows me the same first photo twice.

Overuse of tables for layout.

It also wanted to download some Windows Media file. My browser told me
I'd better close and restart. Probably a good thing, since I don't use
WMP.

Firefox 1.0

 

[scorpion53061]

Well thank you for the constructive critisicism.

Not particularly. Completely unnavigable when JavaScript is disabled.
(Which means that the Googlebot can't index it.) I was not able to get
beyond the first page.

Your "slide show" tells me "Since your web browser does not support
JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:", and
then shows me the same first photo twice.

Overuse of tables for layout.

It also wanted to download some Windows Media file. My browser told me I'd
better close and restart. Probably a good thing, since I don't use WMP.

Firefox 1.0

 

[Steve Sobol]

navigating the sites. Being that Microsoft is the standard, why not mimic
the XP colors and style Microsoft uses?

What an ignorant thing for you to say.

Yes, everyone should mimic Microsoft.

*thwap*

Why not tell us which sites you have a problem with, Bunky?

--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / (e-mail address removed) / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"

 

[Steve Sobol]

You mean they look like your sites - hideous? Isn't this the pot
calling the kettle black?

You need to make your sites much more attractive before you have any
right to criticize others.

Y'know Stephen, I'm putting together a package for realtors because real estate
is big business here (the High Desert is the only affordable place to live
remaining in California, and lots of people move up here from Los Angeles/San
Bernardino/Riverside). I'd offer to give you some advice, but I don't believe
you'll take it because you think we all suck.

My portfolio isn't online at stevesobol.com right now because I'm revamping my
personal website, but perhaps you could look at a couple sites I've designed:

http://www.spiritualcare.org/ (one of my all time favorites)

http://www.justthe.net/ (It's ok, needs to be reworked, but I think it looks
pretty good)

The only major thing about these sites is that they probably won't pass a HTML
validator test, but I've gotten more anal about stuff like that on the projects
I'm currently doing.

--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / (e-mail address removed) / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"

 

[Steve Sobol]

But I don't hold myself out to be a web designer. I've been forced to hack
it out myself because I can't find anyone I would hire or even felt they
were good enough to refer business to. I wish I could find someone because a
lot of Realtors I train are asking for websites and some have big bucks to
spend. I've found these SEO guy's are full of it too. They promise to put
your site in the top ten but they can't get their own site anywhere close.

So.. check out the sites I gave you, tell me what you think... am I worth
hiring? (Be brutal. I can handle it)



--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / (e-mail address removed) / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"

 

[Steve Sobol]

Try http://www.BrokerAgentTraining.com/CMS. It's not my template but this is
more what I personally like to see.

There's not a whole lot more there than on some of the sites you consider
"barren." The swoopy graphic at the top is a nice touch, though.

--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / (e-mail address removed) / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"

 

[Steve Sobol]

3. JACK OF ALL TRADES - these guys are fairly competent coders and also
have reasonable artistic abilities too. They're by no means an expert in
either, but they know enough about each subject to get by un-aided, and
even take time out to offer help and advice to others.

Number 3 is a very rare beast indeed. There are a few in this newsgroup,
but on the whole, you're probably most likely to meet Number 1 in this
group...
That's not a criticism of anyones skills or abilities. It's just an
observation that great designers rarely make great coders, and great
coders rarely make great designers....

I'm okay with Photoshop - the two sites I referred to earlier, spiritualcare
and JustThe.net's site, are ones for which I not only did the original
programming, but also the graphics. (Spiritualcare moved to an IIS server and
was reprogrammed when the company doing the original project was sold, but the
graphics on that site are still mine.)

I farm out some work too, though -- found a lady in Pittsburgh who has gobs and
gobs of talent. She's much better with graphics than I am.

--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / (e-mail address removed) / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"

 

[Murray]

Serviceable enough but loaded with errors -

http://tinyurl.com/6ek8n

 

[Steve Sobol]

I guess I'm not advanced enough to understand the importance of coding

Websites are software... Computer programs.

They're just computer programs running on a web server instead of on your
desktop PC.

Coding is extremely important for any site that has dynamic content, or does
anything complex (Amazon.com, for example, that's one project you couldn't do
just by installing FrontPage and posting a couple static web pages and some
pretty graphics).

out there. I'm sure you can spend a lifetime keeping it error free but
what's the use if in practice it works? Am I thinking wrong?

Yes, you are:

1) it's generally best not to let a site sit with the same content and layout
forever - you should freshen it up on a regular basis

2) but really, coding isn't necessarily about making tweaks to the HTML code on
the page, it's more about setting up and maintaining other functionality on the
site...

It's hard to explain to clients when I have a project I loved but I only did
the programming on it - because they can't *see* the programming, it's not
tangible. The closest I can get is showing them the output of the programs or
scripts that I created.


--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / (e-mail address removed) / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"

 

[Steve Sobol]

In my case it's because nobody is paying me to build my personal site.
It's for no purpose other than to give me easy access to my bookmarks in a
form that allows me to easily point other people to useful stuff. So it's
extremely simple and designed solely for my convenience.

I'm going to try to make mine pretty, because I want to use it to sell my
services. I won't be hawking my services on stevesobol.com, but I want to use
it to put into my portfolio. ("Yeah, look at stevesobol.com, it's another real
pretty, slick website I designed!")

--
JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638)
Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / (e-mail address removed) / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED

"The wisdom of a fool won't set you free"
--New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle"

 

[Eric Jarvis]

I'm going to try to make mine pretty, because I want to use it to sell my
services. I won't be hawking my services on stevesobol.com, but I want to use
it to put into my portfolio. ("Yeah, look at stevesobol.com, it's another real
pretty, slick website I designed!")

I'll be doing that with a business site when I'm healthy enough to start
looking for work again. Until July getting job offers is simply
frustrating.

I don't think my personal site is ugly, but I've made no attempt to make
it appeal visually to anyone other than myself, and its primary purpose is
to load damn fast.

 

[Ben Jamieson]

, your site is probably one of the best examples of the porpose for
which the internet was originally created

Hmm... would that purpose be banner ads, pop-unders and pop-ups then?