CSS | Gregory Brine dot com

OK, so a slightly long winded title, but I have to express a concern of mine. Recently I’ve been trying to hire web developers for my team to build web site, but I’m hitting a continual brick wall… Most of them actually don’t know how to build a web site!

These people know .NET, which is obviously a good thing, but they don’t seem to have any awareness of the other elements of the website. If it’s not in .NET code, and if it’s not a built in .NET control, then why should they need to know it? That’s the way it comes across to me.

When I started learning web development, I tool the approach of learning HTML mark-up first, then moving to server-side code in the form of Coldfusion. It seemed logical to do it that way, as ultimately what the end user sees is HTML. When CSS came along, I jumped on that bandwagon, and loved it. It helped me breath new life into my code. Then I changed from Coldfusion to Classic ASP and Microsoft SQL. All this enabled me to take a Photoshop file and deliver a complete website with a database driven back-end - incidentally built using the CMS systems I have developed over the years.

Recently, I started learning .NET and I’ve realised what a lazy language it is. Everything about it is geared to not really needing to think about anything! Everything is done for you, to the extent where you just need to start typing and Intellisense kicks in and tells you what you probably meant - and most of the time it’s right. I think that should be a good thing as it gives you more time to focus on the HTML, CSS and JavaScript side of things, delivering a great looking, functional website which validates if possible.

This also gives you more time to ensure the other elements of the site are more polished and included, perhaps affording you time to improve your RSS feed to include the most up to date information. Looking at a new technique such as integrating the Open Search for people’s toolbar or including microformats. Carrying out those last checks such as ensuring the Google Analytics and sitemap code is included and working.

However, that’s not how it works now. Apparently, people that know .NET are exempt from knowing anything outside of .NET when it comes to building a website, which to my mind makes them an Application Developer, not a web developer. Recently, we had an intern in who said he was good at html and CSS, but when you say that’s good and can he turn this PSD into a site, he says know, that’s someone else’s job as if he’s more important than that because he knows .NET.

Why has this happened? It’s a single language, so why do these people place so much value on this one skill over the other, in my opinion more important, elements of the site? I think it’s the banks. Think about it. Banks have recently built massive systems and brought everything online over a period, paying people lots of money for that period and then letting them all go once that task was completed, flooding the market with people who thought they understood the web. It’s a shame, but it affects smaller companies the most ultimately.

Add to that that they don’t seem to understand the idea of a good user experience, and are happy if what they build works. They don’t care if it works well, and don’t even seem to notice if something doesn’t work as well as it could. If a page is slow, doesn’t matter, it loads. If a page is hard to use, doesn’t matter as it works doesn’t it? I find that a strange attitude.

We’ve been talking internally, and are hopeful that a change is afoot and that the days of the true web developer will return again. The developers I place highest value on can be given a PSD and produce an entire website, optimised and including all the elements that make a website great! And I really hope that hope comes true.

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This site is going through a bit of a re-vamp at the moment. The old site, at www.gregorybrine.com has been live for a while now, and I felt like re-developing it to have a more web 2.0 design and feel.

A while ago, I built a demonstration version of gregorybrine.com using Ajax. The reason being that I wanted to test a idea I had for a very fast, highly interactive site that we could use for Wiliam’s new web site. The site needed to make heavy use of Ajax and also be search engine friendly. No easy task. That demonstration version has been sitting on my computer for a while now, and I finally started having the ideas I wanted to really push.

So what’s going to be new? Well, I can’t tell you everything yet, as there’s some under the hood stuff I’m doing that I don’t think anyone’s done before. Then there’s the URLs. I wasn’t happy with some of the old ones as they had spaces and non-compliant characters in them. The new site doesn’t have these, and the SEO benefits are already shinning through. The site’s been up for about 3 weeks, and it’s already getting traffic from Google, and hopefully With my planned updates, that’ll increase further still.

The design you see is not the design. It was simple a design I put in to highlight the highly modular nature of the site, and how elements can be updated on the fly. The final one will be something special I hope - I have an amazing web designer helping me get it just right.

Watch this space… I’ll be updating the technology over the coming weeks, and hopefully start designing it too.

And the old URL will soon be pointed to be pointed to the www.gregory-brine.com content

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