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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: New website from a template - good idea?
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
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Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-12-2016 12:11 PM
I really hate what has become of web sites lately. Any sense of proper graphic design is just plain dead with these things. Mobile is all to blame for it.
The need for making web pages "responsive" to fit a whole bunch of different devices is the problem. Phones, tablets, notebooks and regular desktop PCs all have displays that vary extremely in size, resolution, aspect ratio and screen orientation (vertical or horizontal). This is essentially a far worse and far more complicated geometry problem than what video authors faced trying to fit a CinemaScope movie into an old 4:3 TV set.
Basically modern "responsive" web pages can't have any sense of composition at all anymore because no fucking frame can be clearly defined. This shit stinks itself over into photography, illustration and graphic design. If you properly compose your image the "responsive" image frames might change their shape and crop your image in all sorts of stupid, unpredictable ways. Photos end up needing a lot more dead space around the subject and the subject needs to be centered in the frame. Rule of thirds? Golden Spiral? Kiss my ass.
And then there's all the coding. What a mess that has become.
Steve Jobs and co. successfully killed Flash, but replaced it with an even bigger mess, HTML5. Browser makers have adopted it in wildly inconsistent ways. HTML5 offers no performance benefits over Flash when using the same kinds of vector animations in SVG & Canvas objects.
If you want to try to maintain control over the look and composition of your web site, like have it look properly composed on a phone, tablet, PC, etc. You can create separate designs for each and trigger them using break points. BUT, that's a shit-ton of work to do, and you gotta include lots and lots of coding hacks so each tailored layout doesn't fall apart when brought up on older computers whose browsers haven't been updated in years.
A bunch of modern web site functions are heavily tied into JavaScript and JQuery. A web developer who is going to hand code his own web sites has to know those things. He also needs to know AJAX, PHP and a bunch of other shit.
Web design, or rather Web Development has turned into a very user-UNfriendly thing. Mobile complicated the situation even worse. That has forced damned near everyone except for those with lots of time on their hands and computer scientist levels of coding knowledge to just punt and go with the bland template crap.
Wordpress has taken over a huge amount of the web already. Lots of sites are done using Joomla and Drupal too.
I've been messing around with Adobe Muse. It will let you visually design a web site. They just released a new update that incorporates support for responsive layouts. The downside with Muse is the code it generates. There's no rhyme or reason to it, which can turn into a problem for search engine optimization. Muse users have to do a bunch of work within the program to aid SEO.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
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Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-12-2016 06:35 PM
So from reading the above (especially Bobby) I'm thinking maybe I should just stick with the status quo. Maybe make some of the existing pages wider - I think we're currently about 950 pixels wide, something like that.
My site has the most pertinent info on the front page (showtimes, contact, upcoming movie info) and if a person wants to dig deeper, there are pages for history, pictures, some statistics, old news articles and such. Of course the front page gets about 98% of the hits, and it's readable on a mobile device, so maybe I'll just leave well enough alone.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
![](/ubbmembers/840f.jpg)
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-12-2016 09:05 PM
quote: Frank Cox On the other side of the issue, many (most?) websites really have no need to incorporate dancing fish and teddy bears singing Auld Lang Syne.
That's a dismissive judgment on what graphic design brings to the table in web development. There's a lot more to it than just dancing fish or some other superficial crap. Design is important in visually organizing the information in a more legible and more interesting way. It's isn't just about making things "look pretty." Color scheme, choice of type, use of white space and many other things play a part in what is a delicate balancing act.
The latest standards of CSS3 and HTML5 offer the potential for a web page to look almost as visually sophisticated as any high end magazine layout. There are still some limitations. For one thing it's a real pain to access special characters (such as alternate swashes, small caps, ligatures, etc.) in web fonts derived from pro-level OpenType fonts. Anyway, for all the design capability the latest HTML standards offer the whole responsive thing takes a giant shit on it. Hence all the canned template-driven web sites, most of which tap into the same few web fonts served up by Google.
If a web site looks plain as a bowl of cold oatmeal it will lose repeat visitors. They may choose to get the same information elsewhere, such as on Facebook or in some other walled garden of social media.
quote: Frank Cox It's the same sort of planning that as lots of roadside billboard advertising where a restaurant thinks they have to post their entire menu on the sign. Who's going to read that when they're ripping by at 60mph.
Every medium in advertising and information display is different. Comparing billboards to web pages is about like comparing apples to car tires. Billboard advertising is primarily about reinforcing brand identity. The best billboard ads do indeed concentrate on legibility and keeping copy down to the bare minimum. Likewise really shitty billboards are put together like a phone book ad. However, the best billboard ads also boast effective graphic design. If they don't show off a visually compelling image car drivers are going to look right past them. Same thing goes for on premise signs. Plain looking signs and billboards are crap. Even worse, a bad design (including stark/plain design) can reflect badly on the business, making them look cheap or unprofessional.
quote: Justin Hamaker As for the complaint about mobile pages, the easiest solution is to have a mobile and desktop page. It only takes a few lines of code to create a page which scales to fit mobile devices.
It's a little more complicated than that regardless of what tool is used, whether you're hand coding a web site, using a frame work with canned templates (like Wordpress), or more WYSIWYG editing tools like Dreamweaver or Muse. It can get pretty labor intensive if a site's pages have 3 or more break points.
One can't just use one single web page layout and liquid-flow it into every device. Specific choices have to be made on what content to show in each break point layout.
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