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Web Design Articles: Happily Ever After—Tips on Choosing the Web Designer of Your Dreams!
Secrets of the Source
Using your browser's “view
source” command, there is plenty you can learn even if you don't
know much about web pages:
- Does the site have meta tags? A meta tag starts something like <meta name="keywords" content= "design,
designer, web design, etc..">. Metatags can be important for helping some
search engines index your pages properly. Some search engines use the description tag to describe your site in search engine results. If good meta tags are not on the designer's
own site, good meta tags are probably not on the other sites done by the designer.
- Look out for style tags like "mso.normal" or tags that look similar to this: <o:p></o:p>. This means the page was probably created in Microsoft Word. While Word is a great program for creating documents, it sucks as a web editor, producing tons of garbage code that often chokes non-MS browsers. Anyone who can create a Word document can save it as a webpage, although it's ill-suited to the task of creating quality webpages. A web professional won't be using Word for webpages (or, at least any web “professional” you'd want to work with).
- Are there FrontPage tags? Tags in the head area of the source code like <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0"> or <meta name="ProgId" content= "FrontPage.Editor.Document"> show the site was done with Microsoft FrontPage. While FrontPage has made significant strides in the last few years, it is specifically geared for beginners and has a history of significant limitations and coding issues. If some of the designer's early work is done in FrontPage, well, ok. That's actually pretty normal. But if all their stuff appears to be done in FrontPage, this is a concern. If you want a FrontPage site and have used MS Office programs, you probably don't need to hire a web designer to create it for you.
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Do the pages have lots of funny-looking programming stuff that starts with the words "function MM_doSomething?" That means the site was likely done in Dreamweaver (or maybe a related product). Although some designers can't sleep at night if they haven't done all their HTML coding by hand, Dreamweaver is generally accepted as a professional-level tool and is widely used by professional web designers.
- Does the designer use style sheets and inline styling, or font tags? Towards the top of the page, between the <Head> and </Head> tags, a link to a style sheet link will look something like this: <link rel="stylesheet" href="mystyle.css" type="text/css">. Or inline styles may be used, looking something like this: <style type="text/css" media="screen">Blah blah</style>. This is good, since it means the designer is using current web standards to format text. Linked style sheets are particularly powerful, since you can change formatting sitewide by editing a single text file. However, if you see lots of font tags, like <font color="#000000" size="3"> and so on, unless it's a very old site, that's not good. Font tags are depreciated, meaning they are being phased out. Not only will good coding practices make your site easier to maintain, but frankly, professional designers need to be aware of and respect current web standards.
Don't go around kissing toads!
Secrets of the Source
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