The Love Affair of Content and Design

The current project that I am working on is an existing website, that in my opinion is equivalent to a compilation of PDF’s. The amount of content is overwhelming! I come from a design background and therefore am naturally inclined to want pretty to be priority.

This led me to reading many articles ranting the popular phase ” Content is King”. I wanted to grasp the argument of these word lovers. This is my conclusion:

We all know that old saying “If a tree falls in the forest and know is around to hear it does it make a sound?” Well that’s my question with content.

I love content. It is the the substance of the webpage. But if all this powerful content is there and because of the lack of design no one reads it, is it powerful at all?

For me it is simple.  Design is the language that enables a user/interface conversation, the content.

Last Minute Shiny

Back here in the cave where IT dwells, we are always ready for ‘the others’ to come in from ‘out there’ with some new shiny toy they need us to create. The most recent of which just so happened to fit perfectly into my personal Website Development Lesson Plan. They needed a simple three-page site, with static easy to edit maps. Here is the result.

What I learned:

• First and foremost I learned to respect the word Cascading in the name Cascading Style Sheet. It’s easy to go into the CSS file and see each element individually. Tweak it to be exactly how you imagine it and move on. Fortunately, it doesn’t work this way. The reason that this is fortunate is because it forces developers with a design background (like myself) to see the webpage as a whole. These are not just layers that have no connection, rather every action on one element creates a reaction on another.
•  Standards, standards, standards! Much like my past in my standards of men, my initial reaction is to compromise code. This is no bueno! On my HTML page I want info, and on CSS…style. End of story.
• If a project is simple, keep it simple.

Overall this was a super easy project, and perfect for getting my toes wet. I am ready for bigger and better projects to come.

Here are my current ratings based on w3 schools and personal <1-10:

	w3school	Personal
HTML	70%	5
CSS	85%	5

This is a 10% gain in HTML and 15% in CSS from 7/17/2011.