It’s an interesting point is the ability to code in CSS, HTML and JavaScript a skill that is relevant to the User Experience practitioner. Or should that be left to the developers and designers.
Why ask? Well I’m at a crossroads.
You see the nature of the local industry here is such that there just isn’t a constant stream of User Experience work at commercially viable rates. So a I have been supplementing my UX work with a little front end design and development from time to time.
You know in accessibility circles we are constantly telling people using drop down CSS menus that when the menus are not visible we shouldn’t be using display:none to achieve this. We all know this one, right. Just to refresh your memory, remember the display:none rule takes an element assigned right out of the picture completely, for anyone using a screen reader the assigned content will just not “exist”.
This is all well and good. Well that depends, maybe there is a case for the use of display:none afterall.
It’s one of those wet August days in Perth when the sunny and rain just can’t make up their mind who really wants to be the dominate partner. In a similar way a web design business can wrestle with a similar issue. Do you use someone else’s pre-built templates or do you roll your own designs.
Between User Experience and Information Architecture gigs I usually squeeze in a little standard front end web site development. Over the years I have rolled my own, designing each website from scratch to the final interactive site. I have prided myself in this production of a higher quality result that my clients where looking for. Something unique that they knew was a once off.
Now that, WA Web Week is well and truely put to bed, with Edge of the Web, WebJam9 and the WA Web Awards done and dusted; it’s now time to inject some life back into this blog. Yes the posts have been a bit scant of late. Sorry about that, the real world has been getting in the way.
So you have a site that you have lovingly designed coded and integrated into your CMS of choice. You’ve delivered it to the client, perfect. Not a pixel, word or image out of place, following industry best practice. A work of art, electro-prefecto.
Gary Barber
I'm an independent User Experience Designer. I design and enhance complete web user experiences (websites), usable web interfaces, build web architectures, prototypes, conduct usability & accessibility tests or audits.
I just make your websites better than they are.
Want to find out more about me.
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