What are the skills and responsibilities of a web designer?

BFC — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:43:03 GMT

Recently I decided to deepen my knowledge about CSS, reading the book CSS Mastery. This decision was based on the need to create web sites with clean markup, focusing the work of structuring and the look & feel at CSS.

First, I must say that I really enjoyed reading the book. I always saw CSS as being part of the toolbox of a web designer. Let me clarify: I am far away of being a web designer, and to be honest, I was not cut off for the job. But a Web Designer is a must have if you want to succeed doing web sites or web applications.

Let's say that I want to hire a Web Designer to my team: what skills do I have to look for, which distinguish a good web designer? (Comments from web designers are welcome)

One thing I am sure: being just a Designer (not a Web Designer) is not enough for my team. For me, a Designer is someone who knows for example how to work with FreeHand MX, Photoshop, image processing, but has no idea what HTML is, or CSS is, or any other subject related to web. The site that is being produced can even be good looking, but I think the web designer must go further: he has to give me the web template, images, CSSs, etc. More, the Web Designer must understand subjects as Accessibility, or Cross-Browser, Usability, etc. I believe also that there are design types that can be awesome, but they are not for the web. Am I asking too much for a web designer? Don't get me wrong: I am really really out of my comfort zone, since I consider myself as a backend developer (which typically does not work too much with the end user). My question is totally honest!

Why I am posting about this subject? In the moment, my team is configured with a Designer (not a Web Designer), and it was not my decision. Who is trying to fill the gap about web design (html, css, etc,)? We, Web Developers. What is our feeling? That every decision we make (putting a div, a background image, transparencies, etc) is surrounded with the question: are we doing it right? Of course that at the end of the day the job it will be done, with more or less difficulty and errors.

In my opinion, Web Designers are really important to Web Projects and can make the difference about the success or failure of the project. In Web Projects, Web Designers are maybe not sufficient to success, but they are necessary to achieve it.

Again, comments and different visions about the subject are welcome.

BFC

Building a Culture in a Small Professional Services Firm

BFC — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 07:47:41 GMT

One of the most difficulties that exists when managing a small professional services firm is to guarantee that exists a common culture which identifies all the developers in the firm. It is not uncommon to have one developer exclusively dedicated to a customer during a while, or for example, have a team of two developers mixed with customer developers to develop some project. We have some projects that can be developed in-house, and other that cannot. Of course we prefer to develop projects in-house. The daily living is one of the major contributions to build a culture. We can know better each other, and we can see the team as a family. When this kind of dally living is impossible, we must have alternatives to promote our culture.

Recruitment

The culture of a firm starts at the recruitment. When managing a small company, making a mistake when hiring can be the END. I will not detail our recruitment process here, but at interviews we always mention some characteristics that must be present to work at Agilior. Basically we tell our motto: "Learn or Out". We tell to the candidate that at Agilior we are always in continuous learning, and that we have passion about technology. We are always trying to evolve all the time. We tell to the candidate if he does not identify with this kind of behavior he is free to finish the interview.

Conventions

We have conventions defined to our projects at many levels

Source control organization
Visual studio (project structure)
C#
Database
BizTalk
Unit Tests

The main goal of conventions is to define some practices that must be used in all projects. The use of conventions guarantee some consistency between projects, and switching between projects is easy for a developer. The definition of conventions is a "work in progress", since there are always changes to be included. Some time ago we did a task force to draft the initial version. Of course we discussed a lot, since we all have different tastes. But the important is to have our people being committed in the process. We have also to be careful when defining conventions, since the developer creativity can be compromised when defining excessive conventions.

Sharing Knowledge

Having mechanisms to sharing knowledge is extremely important. We have an internal blog, which is much more active that our public blog. Many posts in the internal blog are links: interesting posts, tools, applications, etc. Right now we have 288 posts since January 2008.

We also have a Wiki and Forums in our intranet, however not so active.

One of our fringe benefits is to give to every developer an annual budget to buy books (remember: Learn or Out). The budget can only be used in books (technology, management, entrepreneurship). There is a list in our intranet where we register the books, so everyone knows what is being read at Agilior.

Agilior Meetings

And finally I have to mention that we have our monthly meetings. At the last Friday of each month we schedule a meeting with everyone. This is a technical meeting, where one or two of us are invited to give a presentation about a technical subject. This month, the subject is "Developing in Mono". After the presentation (and discussion) we make some kind of a daily scrum, and each one answer to:

What did you do last month?
What you will do in the next month?

After the meeting, we dine together at our preferred restaurant, with some beers, and "healthy" conversations .

I would like to have all the projects developed in-house, having the team all together, and investing in a good office space, with big monitors, great chairs, etc.. Maybe this is impossible in a consulting firm, and only possible when developing products. For now, we have to deal with the distance, and promote new ways to enrich our culture.

BFC

Management

What are the skills and responsibilities of a web designer?

Building a Culture in a Small Professional Services Firm