• Accessibility, the gloves come off
• Web Standards and The New Professionalism
• A web professional can never stop learning

*Note: these articles are from last year, so this is not a new issue. In fact I meant my article as sort of a 1 year later follow-up from my own personal experience.

I believe that in order to be considered a professional by today’s standards requires a pretty thorough understanding of W3C standards, accessibility, and semantics. It also requires the ability to reach out to the community when you are stuck on a problem and also when you want to share a technique. Marketing goals, IA, and deadlines are problems we solve by understanding our tools (HTML, CSS, DOM) and by knowing how to use those tools properly. Would anyone trust a tile mason who did not know how to run a wet saw?

What are people’s thoughts on this?

When you referred to project goals, you failed to mention accessibility and semantics. Both of these are goals that every professional should have in mind when developing a site. I simply cannot see how letting a code editor write code for you allows you to effectively meet those requirements. If you don’t know what is going on “under the hood,” how can you be certain that project goals are being met? I have seen a large number of websites that fall apart with JavaScript disabled. I can only attribute that to the designer now knowing how to code a <noscript> tag or degrade gracefully. If you never look behind the curtain you can never truly understand how a website works in the wild.

I certainly knew that this post would anger some folks in the community. I would never have guessed that folks would be missing the point as they have been. The point is not to bash Dreamweaver users (I am a proud one myself,) but to point out that there are still folks who cannot code, don’t have a clue about marketing strategy, or even give a rat’s bum about IA. And yes, I do agree with your comments regarding it being harder to find people who are able to translate the goals of the project and needs of the client into a solution. Typically this is not the fault of the designers, per se, but failure on the part of the project manager to outline those goals prior to beginning a project. Project Managers are supposed to step in and help outline goals prior to beginning a project.

And finally, not only does “hand-coded” not equate to good code, it is also not an indicator of professionalism. I too have seen some really awful hand-coded HTML (or PHP, JavaScript, etc.) There is also the matter of the deadline for a project which can greatly affect the finished result.

Hope this helps to clarify my point. :)

You might want to spend more time dwelling on marketing strategy, information architecture, real design, you know, the important things that actually matter to the success of a website.

Building the site is the last thing, and you simply use the right tools for the job. I can hire a dozen people that can ‘hand code’. What’s harder to find is people who can translate the goals of a project and the needs of a client into a solution that works.

Most folks doing Web design today hand-write their code, maybe even using an editor like Dreamweaver switched to code view which can help the designer manage a project more easily.

I code so many different types of files in Dreamweaver and I am satisfied with how it handles all of them. I honestly feel lost without it sometimes when I am using Nix to do some coding.

To bash Dreamweaver was not my point. My point was simply this: there are still folks out there in the Web design profession who do not know how to code and that somehow paying clients are still doing business with them. The clients are the ones who need to be educated so that they understand why we do things a certain way. To me the hobbyist/hack types represent why it is so hard to have people take my profession seriously. If their child can design a web page it makes it difficult for them to justify spending a lot of money on a site.

Just wanted to clarify the point that I was ultimately aiming for with the article. There are multiple obstacles inherent with Web design and two of them happen to be uneducated clients and half-bit design hacks who refuse to update their skills. If you have not already done so, I urge you to read the Jeff Croft article I mention. There are other folks out there who are feeling the pinch too and it is some times nice to vent a little. ;)

Here we go again. Now this is in no way an attack on you, it’s an attack on the point of view you subscribe to.

A couple of points. From what I’ve read, you seem to be lumping all WYSIWYG editors together. There is no way you can put Frontpage in the same class as Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is XHTML compliant and doesn’t mangle code.

Now I’m in no way advocating total WYSIWYG or not learning proper code. I’m just saying, in the real world, when deadlines are upcoming, you simply can’t sit coding “strong” tags just to get a damn word bold.

Please understand there are very nice compliant editors out there, namely Dreamweaver and in the interest of productivity people like myself use it.