POLL: Why do you do web building?

[newbman]

I've been curious why others do web building... I do it as a hobby!

[real_illusions]

pretty much every option you got there, except for "pro wb designer" because i'm not one of them.(yet)

[newbman]

Sorry I didn't make it clear... what I was asking for was your main reason. I have many reasons but my main reason is hobby.

[Jonas]

Hobby/personal websites, because they go hand in hand for me. I've never made a personal website that I've "finished" with. The content is always more or less the same, the layout changes because I like to work with css and layouts as a hobby. It's important not to forget the art...

[mpoer]

I really do all of the above equally... so I don't have a main reason (sorry for being such a knot-head ). I do it for fun/hobby, but also as business, I made a theme for my WordPress Blog, and yeah I do just about everything

[Skemcin]

I've been a professional developer since 1998. But, like anyone else is my profession, I moonlight side jobs all the time.

[newbman]

I've been a professional developer since 1998.  But, like anyone else is my profession, I moonlight side jobs all the time.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Skemcin- You are the one who designed iribbit.net right? It is a truly attractive, professional piece of work. I viewed your portfolio--WOW! Those websites you made are incredible. You couldn't have designed them yourself, right? The graphics and content are laid out so well.

[mpoer]

Skemcin- You are the one who designed iribbit.net right?  It is a truly attractive, professional piece of work.  I viewed your portfolio--WOW! Those websites you made are incredible. You couldn't have designed them yourself, right?  The graphics and content are laid out so well.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

that was pretty much my reaction, too! we have some really skilled designers and developers on these forums. Check out people's profiles, homepages, and sigs, they got good stuff

[Skemcin]

thanks guys. and yes, those sites were designed and development by me. I still maintain them to this day as well.after a while, you learn a thing or two about what user interfaces work for certain types of sites. I basically look at each site like a three ring binder with a table of contents in the front (parent navigation) and then each application of the site as one of the little tabs in that 3-ring notebook. I start simple and force my clients to keep it that way unless they can more or less prove that it needs to be more complicated.

[aspnetguy]

I've been a professional developer since 1998.  But, like anyone else is my profession, I moonlight side jobs all the time.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Me too, the extra cash is nice...but I just like designing so much...I have only been doing development as a professional for 1.5 years but I have been doing it as a hobby for over 6 years.

[newbman]

Interesting, the votes are really spread out. Please vote!

[Err]

Want to become professional web designer. I've only been really into this for about 1 year now, but I already know a lot of it. I'm acutally currently making 2 sites now, O_O, 1 for family and 1 for a small business, and that experaince is priceless . It's what I want to do beucase I LOVE doing this. Going to take some classes to expand my knoweldge too

[Taviii]

Skemcin- You are the one who designed iribbit.net right?  It is a truly attractive, professional piece of work.  I viewed your portfolio--WOW! Those websites you made are incredible. You couldn't have designed them yourself, right?  The graphics and content are laid out so well.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I dont want to look arrogant and I am by no means better than Skemcin but his last design in his portfolio is from "summer 2005" and he still used tables for the layout. Thats a little outdated. If I learned something from all this webdesign world its that you have to constantly learn something new to keep the pace. I'm also learning how to make CSS based layouts and I think thats what all of us should do.Oh and yeah I would like to be a pro webdesigner

[newbman]

Well... from my experience it's hard to layout everything with CSS to make it work in Internet Explorer. It's often necessary to use tables, and if it works well and is convenient why not?

[Skemcin]

Well I appreciate the feedback Taviii. But in my defense there are two important factors that led to that design. First, 60% of that site still uses legacy code - that is code that was created by the previous contracted vendor. Second, if you look closely at the site, you'll notice that only the shell of the site is coded in a table. All the internal sections and columns are all CSS. In fact, the site has three themes that a logged in user is assigned which are all CSS based.However, if you really want a good example of how not to code a site and one that is table intensive, look at "Fall 2003" on my portfolio page, Corvette Collection. Now that is a site that haunts my dreams from time to time. Aside from the tables, I got transparent spacer gif ALL over the place.All in all, it comes down to newbman mentions, it is hard to code a site entirely in CSS so that it can function and appeal to all the right people - mainly those paying for it.I'm pretty confident that if anyone were to look around the web to any of the more popular sites, they are all using tables. Until sites like yahoo.com, amazon.com, or even a minority of the fortune 500 sites are coded entirely in CSS, I won't feel like I am doing an injustice to me, my clients, or the rest of the web development community.(here is a link to Fortune 500 sites)

[scott100]

I'm pretty confident that if anyone were to look around the web to any of the more popular sites, they are all using tables. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeah Skemcin is right, take google for example, that has to be one of the most simplest of pages to design with css, but look at the source code and it's structured using tables... not to mention the use of the <font> tag aswell :)BTW tables arent depricated, ok they take a while longer to render than css but they are still a standard so people are entitled to use them if they wish.Just out of curiosity i ran google through the W3C validation tool, guess how many errors??? Failed validation, 50 errorsmmmm someone needs to get their finger out me thinks...

[newbman]

Yikes!!You think 50 is a lot of errors?Look at Google newsValidate it and get...1263 errors!!

[scott100]

wow that's even worse They obviously just don't give a damn, somehow i don't think they arent the only major site that has rank rotten htmlAfter some quick research:http://www.mozilla.com = 4 errorshttp://www.yahoo.com/ = 304 errorshttp://www.ebay.co.uk/ = 137 errorshttp://www.microsoft.com/ = passed validationhttp://www.w3schools.com/ = passed validation phew!!http://www.opera.com/index.dml = passed validationNotice that microsoft and opera passed validation but mozilla failed....

[newbman]

Lol doesn't Google have thousands of programmers? Can't any of them do web development? Lol they all work on the search engine I guess.

[scott100]

I've no idea how many people work for google but surely one of them has heard of using the w3c validation tool :)You're probably right though, their to focused on the database searches to worry about the front end

[Jonas]

http://www.microsoft.com/ = passed validation

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I can't say I'm not surprised. HTML 4.0 though, ancient...

[Chocolate570]

What do you mean, google front end? They don't have one, at least for their plain search engine. It's a picture, a box, and a couple of links & buttons. If you can't pass validation on that... :|

[scott100]

What do you mean, google front end? They don't have one, at least for their plain search engine. It's a picture, a box, and a couple of links & buttons. If you can't pass validation on that... :|

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What would you class as the front end of a website?

[reportingsjr]

Right now its a hobby, but thats only because im not really old enough to get a job in it. I recently turned 14, so yea.. I wish to get a job in it.