Re: Help Web Designing While Blind

  • From: "black ares" <matematicianu2003@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2010 10:51:13 +0200

You've made some little mistakes in this business.
Mistakes I also did, but this is the way to learn.
I will try to answer to you.
First of all in webdesign you will never find a 100% looking template like a photo in fotoshop. Also you will never find customers that like what you've done, from two reasons 1. They must do this, because they want to try to get the price lower than it was negotiated. 2. They are not technical people may be and they don't understand all this things about design, screens, resolutions and they even don't know rules of best practices to atract customers, they thing that if you have a good loking site, full of wigets ant things this will be the great asset of their business. For this I rarely take website designs contracts and when I take them I negotiate something with the customer and nothing is possible from that point on. Also I never use their men, I have my own designer, choosen by me, I ofer 2 - 5 possible designs to the customer from what they must choose. If you let them decide on things that they don't understand, quickly you will be in such situations. Second, this ofer me the posibility to not offer low rates, they must know nothing about my business, is my affair how, with who and with what instruments I will do my job and my price is....
Why I work so?
In the past I have a similar situation with you, not same parameters but same as you. In the end, the customer have token all my examples, all my designs and finished the site with out paying me something.

Now let go to the developing part.
Novadays the best fixed design is of 1024 per 768,
because this is still the optimul resolution used in this days.
Also this is also a good resolution for an handheld device, smart phone, or something similar and you must pay attention that the site is not accesed only by wide screen owners. I know that the customers don't like white bars along each side part of the site...
This design problem I repair as follows:
First of all I derive from the all design, a recurent background theme.
Second I put that background to all the body element let the body eleement to be fluid.
Third I declare a div in the body, which will be my site in fact.
This div I center on the screen, I set some 960 pixel width, letting it to be as high as the content asks.
This way the site seems to be fluid, but it has fixed width.
The height of the site is in relation with the content.
From my opinion is a stupid thing to put a height to a site.
But if you want, it is not enough to put percentages, because
different browser tends to different react to percentages.
Theer is a javascript procedure to get the width and based on it and on a ratio, to set automaticaly the height of the site.
This way the proportion can be keept.
From typography point of view, having wide websites is not of any help, because you will not have enough content to fill it. And if you fill it there will be so much informations that a visitor will quickly get out from that site. In printing design, I've learned that you myust have 11 - 13 words on a line for a text to be confortable.
Let say that we exced this with 3 - 4 more words, let say that
we put 15 - 16 words on a line, but no more.
If you let the fluid design of all the content you will see that on a wide screen let say with 1680 / 1050 or more 1920 / 1080 your site content will be all on a line, or you will end up with 30 - 50 words on a line.
This thing will be tiring for your visitors.
Conversely if you will do all things to have enough content to fill such a resolution, when some one with a smaller screen will visit the site,
let say some one with 1280 / 768 or less 1024 / 768,
your site will end up with horisontal scroll bars, or with crawded content.
last idea, when some one designs in photoshop how the content will look, the best way to work is to slice their content in small pieces and to use as background, in this way the content will remain the same. How ever, the collors and other graphical things can not be the same on different monitors or computers, I have here at my studio 5 different screens and no one has same colors with another. This depends on the screen capabilities, on the screen calibration, on the screen gama setting. FOr example here I use a gama for the web and another gama for the print, this way I can do let say photographies to look on paper like on the screen. Also I have seen that colors between internet explorer and firefox are displayed different, and in both the color is not the same as I set it in photoshop, where the color is displayed a different way.

Your solution is to make that design look as near as possible by the psd file and to convince your customer that that is all possible and that there are differences between the two environments. Going back to the business, you must accept lower prices never again because you can not do design, how you see, the guy has schecked something in photoshop a 2- 3 hours work and you do the rest of the work. Take your designer, or do something but don't lower the price because you can not do the design. Here I must not have a monthly payed designer, I have 2- 3 individuals very hapy to help me with such work, payed by work.
I pay let say 40$ for a design and that is all.
best regards

----- Original Message ----- From: "Client Services" <Operations@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 8:09 AM
Subject: Help Web Designing While Blind


Hello-

I have a little problem.
I am developing a website for a client. The client wanted to save money and
he said he would provide his own graphic designer in order for me to give
him a lower rate.
I agreed to this and now I am in an interesting situation because of course
the designer does not know CSS.
His graphic designer drew up a very nice psd file in Photoshop.
My wife tried to tell me the colors and the layout for me to program the
css, php, and xhtml files.
The client looked at the first draft and said:
"The proportions are all off and the colors are not what we want."
He told me to look at the Photoshop file to get all the details.
When we looked at the photo shop file, it shows a 1440 by 900 pixel lay out. I am trying to program the site to be fluid with percentages for the height,
left, height, and width settings.
Last night, when we laid it out.  We were going from 10% to 130%.  I
observed to my wife that I thought the video screen was to high but she said
it looked fine even though the last part had to be scrolled down to see.
It seemed to work good on multiple displays from my regular flat screen
monitor, my wife's laptop
and the iphone. But then the graphic designer blew it out of the water and
said it was all wrong.
Now we are trying to set the exact pixels with percentages with mixed
results.
For example, if the logo starts on the 201 pixel down and 201 pixel to the
right of the left margin, the percentage would be calculated by going:
Pixel divided by 16.
But, if this guy drew a 1440 pixel layout, does that mean he won't be happy
unless the designed is fixed at that exact height and width??
Does anybody convert pixel sizes to percentages?
I thought it would be straight forward to lay out exactly what he wants.
But, I am not sure if this will work with a fluid design. And I am not sure
a 1440 pixel wide design is the best web design.
Questions:
1. Anybody have any general comments on my problem?
2. Will proportions be correct in a fluid layout?
3. Anybody know if 1440 pixel fixed designs are of any good?
4. Anybody know somebody who is very good at css , Drupal,
and could help me finish this tomorrow?  My cell phone is 202-320-4868.


Thank you.
H.R. Soltani

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