I have wasted thousands of dollars to understand this and now I will share it with you for free. For 99.7% of webs sites, including sleek corporate web sites, there are tools available for creating professional looking pages and blogs with all interactivity you can eat that are free or virtually free. These tools are scattered and require some trial and error to set up. The tools require no programming or very basic technical skill to manipulate, safe to say that an average person who knows how to use a computer can manage the task.
The problem is that it takes time to find and select proper tools for your site. In comes a “web designer” who is a broker between the tools that are available mostly for free and your need for a web identity. No offense to my web designers friends out there, hey who am I to speak bad about pimping? To be sure I will be offending not only the web designers but perhaps our entire “service economy” whose dubious motto is to take a product that was created for free by some Opens Source geeks or virtually free by a slave labor and then re-package, re-market, re-manipulate and re-sell it to you.
Gone are the days when a web page was just a static image, sort of an uploaded PDF. Today web sites are interactive, they are living organisms that allow people to communicate, search and feel, as a marketing jargon they are often referred to as web 2.0. There are three components to a modern web site:
- Database bottom layer that stores and serves all the data, i.e. MySQL, etc.
- Middle layer is a scripting language that communicates between the database and the top graphics layer. This is the most substantively important engine that differentiates between web sites. It is sometimes referred to as CMS content management system). Most CMSs use PHP (Word Press or Drupal, etc.), some legacy code is written in Perl (Movable Type); there are sites that use Java, etc. This middle layer is a language that translates between the database and the graphics layer that you actually see on a page.
- Top graphics layer is a skin, it can be changed with a switch of button and identical web sites could look drastically different. Changing this layer is like putting on a different coat. It literally uses “hooks” to speak to the database using the scripting language of the middle layer. This layer is a template, styled or “themed” with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is where a graphic designer comes in. They can draw a page in a Photoshop and use free tools to translate a Photoshop page into CSS. Like a same coat that you can put on different people, same template or a theme could be used on different web sites.
Now that we touched upon the three layers of a web page you will understand that there a very different sets of skills required for each of the layers, so when you meet a “web designer” try to figure out who are you talking to:
- A geek who is only interested in playing around with databases and scripts and who couldn’t care less how your site looks. Trust me, he will f. you up in the end and the site will end up looking like s.
- A graphic designer who knows a lot a about Photoshop but little about the living brain of any web site (the database layer) or the language that the web site speaks (the middle scripting layer).
- Or most likely you are talking to a marketer or a broker. He tells you things he/she thinks you want to hear and generally intentionally makes simple things sound more complicated, taking advantage of you intimidation with things technical (an example of this is the entire SEO industry, a pseudo science that takes a rather basic subject and turns it into a mystery).
I know I am simplifying things and I mean no offense to the hard working professionals who are trying to make a honorable living in the field but I hope this is helpful to people who want a web site or even the designers themselves, especially today when many are using the lull in the economy to rethink their web identity.
