April 05, 2005

• Open Standards, Doris! Come on now.... How long have you been in the web page making business? Simply put , unless you're already graphic-designery, Dreamweaver's gonna do you no good. DW is a tool for artists... not bloggers. Did that make sense? Cause ... hell.
• Yes I have graphic design experience. Lots of. I am not a 'blogger'.
• I sympathize Doris; I spend way too much time tinkering with my blog. Still, as cool as some of those designs are, I'm not sure I'd ever use one. I enjoy the hunt too much :)
• You can't really have a "blog" without being a "blogger". /bearer of bad tidings
• You can write without being a writer.. can't you? Anyway my blog isn't up yet and not likely to be due to my laziness.
• Capote thought so.
• Err ... I'm not sure he had opinion about your laziness, however.
• Or even had "an" opinion.
• Some very nice designs there.
• Drag thing is that most of what looks interesting isn't free. It may be open source but it sure looks pay to play for anything I'd be interested in. Does anyone know of sites that actually have good stuff for free? Rather than some basic teasers with everything interesting at a cost? I Must still be sleepy, I just used the word interesting three times. Great writing nonbinary! Now, stop goofing off and get back to work...as a copywriter. D'oh!
• In answer to your questions: 1. Google is a wonderful thing. 2. I dunno about you, but I blame my family for my stupidity. It's much easier to pass the buck. 3. Ah, Doris - the other eternal question. Many have asked that question before you and yet failed to achieve a satisfactory answer. Such a simple question, with such a myriad of answers. Really, Doris. I don't know. I think that's a question only you can answer. By the way, those designs are rather dull, drab and unexciting and having a blog does make you a blogger, although it does not necessarily make you annoying or read. Your moment of clarity has passed.
• Thankyou so much for your aggressively sarcastic reply, drivingmenuts. I enjoyed it. As it happens, I posted this link for the less cliquey, less-totally self-absorbed web creatives amongst us.. it might be that MoFi is full of web wankers who are founts of knowledge about design, but I had thought it was less poncey than that. Thanks, however, for the attention from the token stuck-up self-important geek prick demographic. I always like to be able to identify them in any given group, so that I can maximise my distance. My moment of clarity? WTF was that supposed to mean? You just wanted to use that phrase, right? Cos it makes no sense in relation to the rest of what you wrote. If my moment of clarity is the blessing of the shaft of light of your genius reply, then please continue to shove your head further up your rectum, I'm sure there's a Guinness Record for that. This post was not for genii like you, and for further 'clarity', if anyone thinks they have some smartassed "I can do better than this" attitude that they just have to share here, please just go ahead and fuck off. I for one am tired of that shit. This post is for people who have not spent 15 years in a cubicle only interacting with a computer, and, hopefully, have some modicum of cheerfulness, quite unlike this here reply of mine.
• This place has just gone downhill since that guy with the pet chicken left.
• Doris - I think he was joking...
• There was a pet Chicken? How'd I miss that?
• OK, I'll start.
• These appear to cost money. As far as being open source is concerned, it's kind of impossible to build a closed source website unless you do HTML obfuscation; which would limit customizability and render the sites near useless to customers.
• drivingmenuts isn't a prick, doris, and obviously neither are you. I'm sure this is just a case of the different connotations, permutations and whirlygigs of wordz zigzagging retrograde and rubbing up the wrong way when no true offence was meant by he to thee. I'm sure he'll come back and apologise and then we can all go out the back and have hot sex with one another an' shit.
• I bookmarked this link BTW - thank you for it.
• You're all bastards. All of you. Don't think I can't tell.
• I like a lot of those templates. I think I'll build me a blog so I can use 'em.
• Doris, I am also a web designer/developer. What are the specific issues you are having with DW? I personally find it much easier to build a page design in a non-wysiwyg type editor, where I have more hands-on control of the code. you can always pop it into DW later on. If you have any particular questions, feel free to email me, happy to help if I can. re the open source site, it seems to me one always "gets what you pays for" so no surprise that the better designs are not free, no? you may still ultimately find it more rewarding to bang yr head against it all and come up with yr own design, more satisfying in the end, and free...good luck.
• Isn't all web design more or less open source? I know the web developer extension for firefox has been great for me to learn how CSS works (not that I totally have a handle on it, but it is a lot easier than changing something and switching it in dreamweaver or nvu).
• Medusa, etc: Dreamweaver = Homesite. Macromedia bought Homesite a while back. Put DW in code mode and it is literally the exact same software. You have complete and total control over the code. It is the best professional development tool out there by far.
• looking at this page, my first reaction is if they are free, you're getting what you paid for. all of the designs featured on the main page, as well as the main page itself, are pretty dull and bland. i think they'd be fine for a small company with a non-designer trying to build a site, but, as someone who builds sites professionally, i'd be pretty embarrassed to submit any of these designs. i'm al what Medusa said...
• I do a tiny bit of web-page tinkering, and I found this site interesting and possibly helpful. Thanks! It seems to me that these designs are clean, simple, more-readable and more-usable than average, with more style and visual flair than I seem to manage in my own tinkering. Interesting, then, that they are dismissed by those in the know as "bland," "dull," "drab," etc. As a web surfer, I'd like to see more of the web be so easy-to-use.
• Amen to that, Lagged2Death. I realize that the point of some of the edgier and highly interactive designs may be to engage the user. I also believe that the internet fosters a different type of discourse that requires a new and dynamic language. However, I do think some presentations can be a bit overwhelming, intimidating, and a little too self-conscious.
• I hate DW- I like firefox with the editCSS plugin. You'll have to write your own CSS code without DW's help, but it's easier if you start from the ground up with your own code, and understand each bit along the way. When DW is doing half the work, it's easy to lose track of what's going on, which usually means that anything that's not automatic and very easy to implement, is very hard. As far as the design goes, I don't think you can't make a complex/flashy design that is good for general purpose sites. Some of those premium designs on that site would only be good for very specific applications. If you want a complex design for your blog, you first have to list what you want on there. If it's just blog entries and links, there's not a whole lot you can do with that. If you've got more, then list it all out, and figure out how you want to divide it into different pages/sections/columns. This list of content will drive your design- if you've got a lot, you might want more than one page and a nav bar, or maybe tabs; you may have some content that would work well in a floating column; if you have big photos, you definitely have to design around that. The point is, you can't use someone else's complex design unless they created it to display the same kind content that you plan to have. Make your list, sketch out some creative ways to display it, then code it yourself. CSS is not as intimidating as it may seem.
• No, it's not really that tough to do CSS, once you start getting your feet wet. DW is really good software, but really I've found it to be at least as easy just to use a text editor to design the page. And I'm not really that talented or experienced in web design. Of course, I've never really put together anything all that complicated, either.
• Yes, the premium designs cost money. There are obvious reasons. I was around when the site first popped up, and there were no premium designs, just free ones. After it became popular, the site started including those. Presumably it gets a cut from those that get sold (or is it licensed?). I don't think there's a problem with that, there are nice ones in the free section (although basic, but that's what I like). For those that note that everything web is 'open source', not so; they are using the term in this case to mean not only is the code available to everyone (as is every web page), but modifiable and redistributable as you see fit. I don't think you could get away with taking Microsoft's design, for example... Although I encourage you to try :)
• I'm excessively lazy when it comes to web design, as one can tell by my blog where all I think I did was change the background colour. I'd happily steal templates, bland or no. Doesn't anyone wonder how someone as non-techie as me started MoFi? I do.
• I find this to be a great resource.
• One of my favorite webpage designs is "presented in naive minimalism" - black text on a white screen with blue links and a judicious use of horozontal lines. I think the use of larger fonts for headings, and a goodly amount of white space was what kept it so elegantly simple but also ergonomic.