A computer science friend of mine recently asked me a bunch of questions regarding my web development practices. Here they are:
Q: Do you hack up the javascript on pages as well as all the badass art creation and CSS magic?
A: I do some Javascript. I try to avoid it as much as possible, though, as it’s hard to determine a user’s environment, and many people still have Javascript turned off. The sites I work on don’t have very specific targeted demographic, so I have to try to design en mass. The things I do in Javascript are photo galleries or preload images and such. Now, if it’s a more complicated site with a narrower audience, I allow for more Javascript.
Q: How do you design your sites to be compatible in all the browsers?
A: Browser compatibility is one of the worst and frustrating things ever, that is if you build a site entirely in CSS. Unfortunately you have to do hacks for each browser and a LOT of testing. you can do an if statement in the HTML to redirect to browser-specific CSS, especially for IE6 (that one is the hardest one to get css to render correctly). Dreamweaver has a handy browser-compatibility tool now to check while you code. There are also sites that allow you to input a url and they will screen capture what it looks like in all the browsers. I recommend this.
Q: Other than Photoshop what kinds of tools do you use?
A: As I do both print and web work, I use the whole Adobe Suite. For web specifically, I use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash. I’ve tried Fireworks but couldn’t get into it. I use Transmit as my FTP program (one of the best GUI interfaces I’ve found). I think that’s about it.
Q: Where can I see some of your work?
A: http://www.alisoncarrier.com is my portfolio. I’m in the process of updating the site, though, so it doesn’t have my most recent work.
Q: Do you deal with the backend app coding at all or is there a dedicated team for that?
A: Backend coding depends. For my freelance, I do a lot of it. PHP is one of my favorite languages to work in, so I try to take every opportunity to do so, especially if it involves mySQL databases. At work, though, I do mainly front-end stuff, just because of the breadth of projects I’m working on. After that we use freelancers to do backend stuff.
Q: What are most of your sites powered by? PHP on Lamp stack? ASP.NET? Ruby on Rails?
A: PHP all the way. I am a big fan of any open-source, so I tend to use that in my sites. Freelancing, I’m dabbling in ROR, but don’t have much experience. I’m also trying to dabble in Drupal as well.
Hope this enlightens those about what goes on in a web developer’s head. If you have any graphic/web questions, feel free to post them!
