The Web Designer Muscle

I don't consider myself much of a Web designer. Maybe I am, and I just don't know. I don't get many opportunities to work out that particular muscle of my brain very often. There are people who do this kind of thing all day, every day, designing dozens and dozens of pages and sites over the course of a year. I am not one of them. So maybe in the sense that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been a great racing driver I might be a passable Web designer, but I don't do enough to feel comfortable or confident, most of the time.

My world is one of Dreamweaver Templates. We come up with a new design every few years, hammering on the sharp edges of various new technologies and… then that's pretty much it. File ⇒ New gets you, instantly, a fresh, clean copy of the design's blank page, with all of the baked-in goodness, well, baked-in.

The great wheel turns and three summers have come and gone and it is once again time to do it all over. I am really enjoying this redesign process and once again wishing I did a little more of this kind of thing. Not that I am ready to bag it all and work full-time at a Web agency or anything like that. There is a lot of comfort in a good Template. I can whip a typical student worker or staff secretary into a Web frenzy in about an hour and a half and create another soldier in the Standards Compliance Army who can then create a wonderful new page in only about ten minutes. I enjoy that.

But it's nice to wonder, "What if we moved this little bit over here?" now and then. I have to justify my existence to my Director every year—why shouldn't the Search Window or QuickLinks bar have to, right? Inertia is a strange and wonderful thing but I wonder if it isn't responsible for more bad in the world than good. "Because we have always done it this way" is the bane of many a modern business process, not just in Web design, I'm sure.

The last several weeks I have spent quite a few hours in this design process. This is many more than I do outside of the six months or so every three years when we are actually building a new template. It is fascinating to see the process at work. Mark Twain once said that there are two things you never want to see being made, "Law, and sausages". I suspect he may have said as much about Web design, but I find it compelling. Here's a guy (or just as often, a gal) with a favorite aspect of their candidate for Next Design, advocating for their way of doing things over someone else's ideas.

Some of these are great ideas, really. Some of them are, well, kind of average. Some are things we could and maybe should do immediately and quite often someone will come up with an idea that works wonderfully on every computer on the planet, but not on, say, the new smart cell phones. Remember, we are building a page today for the Web world of next year, the year beyond and the year beyond that, as well. It's likely that some huge percentage of our usage will be coming from these little appliances in the years ahead. They are a not-inconsequential portion of the market today, but they may be the majority by 2011.

We get a bunch of this kind of thing. Here's a wonderful navigation scheme, but it is almost unworkable without JavaScript, or Flash? That's useless, to us. A great new way to do this or that, but something that doesn't function in screen-readers? Again, great for someone else, but not us. It is challenging, building a page that is easy to learn and easy to use. It's a challenge building a page that can hold a simple photo and brief message as well as multiple columns of text with illustrations.

I'm glad to be a part of it. I wish I did a little more of it. But make no mistake, I am glad that it only rolls around once every few years, too.