The 7 commands of new web designers

So you have played around with some design and HTML coding and you decided to offer web design services. You know you can do a lot of nice, competitive things, you have lots of ideas, and you enjoy the work. So far, so good, but keep in mind that when you were just playing around, you used to replace things that you did not manage to draw, or to code, with some other elements.

When you work for a client, the situation is this: if the client wants a rose button on a round corner of the background, he should get what he wants. You cannot tell him: Hey, but I don’t know how to code that! Please, change your mind!

I am new to the web design business, and I completed a few projects already, so I wanted to share with you my learnings so far:

1. When you make the layout proposals, think how you are going to do the coding. If you choose a non-repetitive, complicated background, you may face the situation that you cannot use CSS to reproduce it, thus being forced to manually adapt it for each page length.
2. Make the site fully maintainable by the client. It’s extremely useful especially if the site has a News section. You may not want the client bombing you every other day with “please add this”, or “please remove that” (unless they pay you for that).
3. Always check the layout in at least three browsers: Firefox, IE 6 and IE 7. While in Firefox and IE 7 things often look similar, with IE 6 you may have the surprise of the sidebar being displayed below the rest of the page.
4. Work with php rather than html files. It may sound foolish, but if you made a 50 pages website, think what amount of work is needed to add or modify a counter or a tracking code which needs to figure on each page. Using php allows you to call an external file, which you can just name footer.php, where you can place any info you want to have on all pages. Then, if you have to make changes to that, you don’t need to go through all 50 pages, you just modify the footer, upload it, and you’re done.
5. Insert comments in your code. Comments help you to know at first glance where a routing starts and where it ends. Let’s say you want to find the navigation bar: wouldn’t it help you if you looked for the “Start navigation bar” comment, than browsing hundreds on lines of code to find that section?
6. There is nothing wrong in using tables. I came across lots of articles which say that tables are obsolete, and they give you I don’t know how many reasons to use CSS. That’s perfectly fine if you know what you are doing well enough. But if you are a beginner, you may end up in a complete mess, and with an endless CSS file, which gives you headaches each time you need to find something. You may say that CSS layouts look better. Then you may not be aware that it is possible to have rounded corners also in HTML tables. I agree that it is easier and faster to manage CSS than tables, but only if you mater them. Sometimes it is better to take the long, well-known road to a destination, than take an unknown shortcut.
7. Whenever you make a change to the code and you are not 100% sure you know what you are doing, save a copy of your initial file, so you can use it in case you mess up things with the new change.

If you are also new to the web design business and you want to share with us some of the lessons you learned from your first projects, feel free to leave your comments here.