I am working for a large department in a university and we are developing a new web site in which the we want to really take advantage of the decoupling of data and design of our page.
We are writing the all of the logic in house, but want to hire a professional web developer to do the design and layout of the page. All of the HTML is written with absolutely no design at all... all it has is a lot of div, span, .... tags so that css will be able to access it later.
My question is this:
Is there any kind of Style Guide we should write to give to the developer so that they can see what tags are used in what places, or should they be given the actual HTML code to work with. By saying "style guide," I guess I am getting at a document which explains that The title bar has 2 nested div tags with ids "title1" and "title2"... basically laying out what is on the page without actually shipping out the code.
I have never really worked with a Pro Dev. before, so I don't really know the way it works. If you have developed pages like this, please just drop a small line for advice.
Thanks,
Ryan
Question for Pro Developers
I have never worked like this as I develop and style my own web applications and sites, but I can give you some advice...
Let the dog see the rabbit. Definitely. Without a shadow of a doubt.
Oh, and you need a designer, not a developer. You are doing the development.
And don't be surprised if you run into problems as the position, nestling and flow of the raw code will greatly restrict the designers' ability to work freely and hack effectively.
Personally, I don't think you're going about this the right way. You need to find a designer you can work with and involve him or her from the very start. If the code is already set in stone then someone somewhere will be sure to be able to work around it, but if you want the designer to give his all to the project then you need to be able to adapt what you have to suit his or her suggestions. CSS is not yet a black-and-white art. There are too many greys to spoil your project.
I'll be interested to know how you get on though. It's going to depend totally upon your ability to get on with your chosen designer. Keep them happy!
BTW: this post is in the wrong section
Question for Pro Developers
THIS THREAD MOVED TO SITE STRUCTURE.
Moderator, please delete this thread.
Question for Pro Developers
We are still developing... iterating through the code and fixing bugs. We don't plan to have everything set in stone when the designer gets involved. So we will definatley include the designer with this process of implementing the HTML.
We are developing this is ASP.NET, so they probably won't need to see the code behind that because each ASP tag describes its own css class name when you use it in the HTML page.
Thanks for your help, and I will reply back with any updates later. If anyone else has any comments please let me know.
Thanks,
Ryan
Question for Pro Developers
I've had that funny feeling of deja vu
Question for Pro Developers
I've had that funny feeling of deja vu