[Gllug] Website designer who doesn't suck

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 06:07:21PM +0000, Tethys wrote:
> Indeed. Looking at it in mozilla, the fact that it does browser sniffing
> and redirects me to an "ns5" specific page shows the he *doesn't* get
> what you're asking for. If you're having to write spearate pages for
> different browsers, then you really need a smack round the head with
> a cluestick...

True enough ...  having said that we do sometimes serve up different
CSS pages to cope with IE's CSS bugs.  eg. http://www.merjis.com [see
why we need a web designer?] has IE-specific CSS and everything-else-
specific CSS.  You won't be able to see this because I think it's all
done using server-side browser sniffing.  On other websites we've done
which are less CSS-intensive we've used a single stylesheet.  eg.
http://www.j-london.com/ has a single common stylesheet.  It has some
bugs related to IE, but not enough that we needed to serve up a
separate stylesheet for this.

We're looking for someone who really understands:

* Using semantic markup, and adding styling over that just using CSS
(try looking at the markup structure of http://www.execellence.com/).

* Bringing the content of the page up to the top so that Google can
find it.  (Do a View->Source on http://www.j-london.com/ and note that
the content appears in the HTML well before the navigation).

* URL structure (http://www.j-london.com/ has very well-defined URLs
which are rewritten using server-side includes and mod_rewrite onto
the actual implementation scripts).  We *want* people to be able to
bookmark and deep link to our pages.

In our experience, very very few web designers in the UK really
understand these issues or why they're important.  We're looking for
one of them.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because I have been
standing in the footprints of giants.  -- from Usenet
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