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Professional Website?
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TOPIC: Professional Website?
#88164
see03
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Professional Website? 11 Years, 8 Months ago Karma: 8
I was kind of wondering what some people's opinions were about professional websites. I'm studying to be a designer, and right now everyone in my program is getting hyped up about professional websites. Most of us are buying our own websites (I bought my own), but the time is coming up for me to pay for another year, and I'm debating switching to something like ProSite, or CargoCollective.

I was just wondering if there is anyone on here with experience with this, and what their opinion might be.
 
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#88385
None
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Re:Professional Website? 11 Years, 8 Months ago Karma: 57
'Professional Website' is a fairly broad and vague term. You could mean anything from a static straight text website to a dynamic website that's based around a database or several database to organize its physical contents, plus with programming codes in C++, Javascript, PHP, ASP, and so on dependent on the format and the website building tools you're using, whether its Linux or Windows based, or whether its scripted by hand or builder-application generated using Visual Studio for example where you're added in the database my creating it by hand, or having it auto-generated for you some other way.

I'm not really sure what you mean by 'Professional Website'. Do you mean a website created purely for non-commercial or private purposes say for example a portfolio website an artist might use to advertise their artwork or something like Dokuga that's dynamic using a database-structure?

The term 'Professional Website' could have many meanings from just a freelance programmer/web-designer setting up their own private site with their own scripting or a consumer purchasing a website ready-made package with web-hosting support from a webhosting company, with registration tags for the addy address, email accounts, user-support, and backups and everything else that could come with that too.

You could also mean a commercial website for a small business to advertise on the web via E-commerce.

'Professional Website' could also just be an excellent website designed that's non-commercial but functional enough to look and work fairly well. Plus I've seen several 'Professional' commercial websites that looked pretty but were very poorly designed in terms of end-user usability. So I'm not fairly sure what you mean by 'Professional Website', for example if a website is designed by a professional designer it won't necessarily be good.

Only 'User-Friendly' websites are 'Good' and I mean 'really good' because they cater to the needs of their end-user base, continually try to improve, and not only look good but function well most of the time without serious technical hitches. Like Dokuga which in my opinion is a very 'Professional Website' even if it is for non-commercial usage. Plus it has an easy to understand format, is familiar, and easy to navigate, and use. Another bonus.

My compliments to our Admins for continuing to do a wonderful job.

~ Pyre
 
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#88398
Mitharus
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Re:Professional Website? 11 Years, 8 Months ago Karma: 53
Pyreite wrote:
... not only look good but function well most of the time without serious technical hitches. Like Dokuga which in my opinion is a very 'Professional Website' even if it is for non-commercial usage. Plus it has an easy to understand format, is familiar, and easy to navigate, and use. Another bonus.

My compliments to our Admins for continuing to do a wonderful job.


*ponder*

Thanks for saying this kludge is ... professional? I guess it does, most the time, do what it's supposed to without having to beat it with a rubber chicken and threatening more ... dire consequences, if it doesn't work.

see03:

(Err... rambling and such... yeah.)

For the most part, I have to agree with Pyreite on the 'Professional Website' thing. I mean, technically, this site is "Professional", and it's a hack. Really, what was I thinking making *all* the pages be loaded from a single index.php page. Doesn't really help much when tracing logs for page hits since *technically* I could use a form and POST through out the site and get the same effect since my index.php will handle both POST and GET for what it does. Seriously, using PATH_INFO would have been better but ... Mehh.

The only "fun" thing, is the multiple CSS styles you can select, but that was mostly just done as an example for Instructors/Students on different CSS layouts with the same HTML source (Yeah, doesn't change much, but enough that a difference could be noticed).

I would actually some what consider my web skeleton structure more "professional" in some ways than the main site. Having the abs sized menu block, and the left margin on inner blocks does screw with the dynamic resizing but... that's overall minor.

I personally prefer the simple, text sites. But now days most everyday users don't see them as "good" if you can't interact with them (drop downs, drag-able items, a mash-up of different "social" crap, etc... (basically what they call all the Web 2.0 crap that they've been doing since Web 1.0, but didn't have the fancy ajax term defined)).

I mean, when a site is built with 90% javascript, and everything is done from iframes, and generated DOM structure, then it's pretty much worthless for anything. I've seen sites where the HTML that's downloaded boils down to:

Code:


<html>
  <head>
  <title>Loading....</title>
  </head
  <body></body>
</html>



So, if you don't have JavaScript enabled you're screwed ... no viewing the site for you! It gets even worse on *Business* sites that have this. Many screen readers (blind folks) don't parse JavaScript, and then even when they do, by using CSS and DOM manipulation, you're messing the structure up since most people ignore the tags for the screen readers to move around a site. That isn't professional, it's just cutting out possible customers, and depending on your business, opening yourself to law suites (Many online educational sites are really bad about this :/ ).

Dokuga is "okay" in this regard, at least the main page does degrade decently to text only. I use 'lynx' for the majority of my testing ... no JavaScript; If I want to test some basic JavaScript I use the program 'links' (it also has basic frame support).

Err... yeah. So, what was I saying. Ohh! Yes, the term 'Professional Website' is a marketing term, and that's it. Basically the same thing as SEO crap. If the content itself is worth anything, then even if the "site" is just a link of text files and summaries, it'd be better than many out there.

It's the content that really matters. Everything else is just decoration. Or something.

-J
 
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#88399
see03
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Re:Professional Website? 11 Years, 8 Months ago Karma: 8
Sorry, I didn't think I was unclear. I did mention that I'm studying to be a designer, so by professional website, I mean a designer's website, ie. a portfolio website. I'm not sure if building my own looks better to a prospective employer than a really nice one through sites like ProSite or CargoCollective.
 
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Last Edit: 2013/03/16 18:23 By see03.
 
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#88400
Mitharus
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Re:Professional Website? 11 Years, 8 Months ago Karma: 53
see03 wrote:
Sorry, I didn't think I was unclear. I did mention that I'm studying to be a designer, so by professional website, I mean a designer's website, ie. a portfolio website. I'm not sure if building my own looks better to a prospective employer than a really nice one through sites like ProSite or CargoCollective.

Ohh... a Portfolio site. That is a different beast.

I've never actually looked at any paid for services for anything like that (I've always ran my own server), so I can't help on any input there besides... Yup, you'll want to have something.

What type of design are you focusing on? When you said "design" and "website" then I figured you were in Web design, but if you're doing graphic design, illustration, architecture, or something similar, that lends itself much better to an online portfolio, than trying to have a portfolio of sites that have been designed.

-J
 
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#88410
see03
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Re:Professional Website? 11 Years, 8 Months ago Karma: 8
Yeah, I'm entering graphic design and illustration. I just need something simple to display my work, which is why I originally was just going to code it myself (I know some simple coding, and figured that'd be enough), but even the simple templates at most free portfolio websites have more potential than what I've done with my website. So I'm leaning very heavily at slowly switching over. It costs about the same as I'm paying already, so that's not an issue - I'm mostly worried that a potential employer would be less impressed that I'm using a template than coding on my own, but on the other hand, I'd rather it look great and be a template, than only look passably decent and be my own coding.
 
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