Web Templates Blog is happy to present another in a series of interviews: today we talk with the notable Webpage Designer, Andy Rutledge of AndyRutledge.com. Andy Rutledge has some opinionated but well-grounded articles on his blog that really caught my interest. I got a charge out of his article on suggestions for redesigning the White House blogsite. Andy’s portfolio is just as interesting. Andy’s opinions show creativity while maintaining some necessary detachment, and I found myself agreeing with some of his ideas. So, heeeeere’s Andy!

“I’ve always been a creative – artist, composer, etc… - so when I got a computer, one of the first things I wanted to know how to do was to build websites. I managed a chain of retail stores at that time and I wanted our website to be better than any of our competitors. It looked to me like that would be an easy task, as their sites were very poorly designed. I figured that I could design better than those and wanted to learn how to put it on the web in HTML.”

Andy continues, “As an artist, I already had a grasp of design and started by making sites for myself and friends. However well or poorly designed they were, they were coded horribly, though. I used WYSIWYG editors back then, like FrontPage, so the code was absolute trash. I later found that I could make a decent living doing it, so I just kept at it and still keep at it, learning every day how to improve my design and improve my coding.”

When I asked Andy about his toughest-ever customer - “Well, they’re almost all tough. But that’s the job; this is not art, it’s design. Design, by its very definition, requires that we work within lots of constraints. It’s my job to make what I believe to be relevant suggestions and even cajole clients into changing their perspective now and then, but in the end I have to work within the bounds of the project as the client defines it. . . There’s really no single one that jumps out, but some recurring themes are awful logos/identities that have to fit somehow into the new site design, or garish corporate colors that clients are unwilling to deviate from.”

On Web Standards, “Web standards are a good baseline for the absolute minimum requirements for development competence. And they’re only one necessary piece of a contextual and highly relevant puzzle. Web standards go hand-in-hand with accessibility, SEO and code semantics. Everyone who wants to be a web development professional should have a firm grasp of these principles and be steadfast in putting them into practice. Otherwise, we’re delivering inferior product to our clients. That’s simply unethical and irresponsible. . . If you’re a professional, it’s critical to always put these standards into practice. If you’re not a professional, you’re surely free to produce jacked-up sites and code all you want. So long as you know you’re ‘doing it wrong.’ ”

About the future Andy adds, “Well, design is design. Cultural context and contemporary trends do impact design to some degree, but it’s all about communication. I see no great ‘new thing’ in page design in the near future.” From a more immediate standpoint Andy put in a word about XML: “For under the hood, though, XML is where we’re headed. HTML will ultimately be replaced by XML and we need to start learning it now. Already, you’ve got to know some XML and XSLT authoring in order to interact with some sites and technologies today.”

I asked if Andy had ever worked with website templates, “Yes, I learned a lot from other people’s templates when I was just starting out. I’d purchase a template/site and then rip it apart to see how they did things. In time I learned that these sites were most often very poorly developed. I think that templates are a good solution for no-budget online needs when you’ve just got to get your company or organization a web presence and you’ve not got the time or need for a unique brand or user experience. Beyond that, templates are a non-solution for business. A successful website design can only be conceived in the specific context of a company/organizations brand context, aims, vision and needs – balanced by the desires, needs and expectations of the target audience. Anything less than that is a failure. Templates simply cannot meet these needs in this context.”

Andy, what about Flash technology? - “It’s wonderful. I’m not a Flash programmer, but it’s a great technology with a lot of beneficial and entertaining uses. Like all technology, it has its limitations and can be bastardized and ill-used. But in the right context, it’s often a great solution.”

Andy named three websites that he admires, “One of my all-time faves is the Serco Transarctic expedition site. http://www.sercotransarctic.com/ by Damien du Toit. Beautiful execution and terrific design. For content, it’s hard to beat Design Observer www.designobserver.com/ and A List Apart
www.alistapart.com.”

I asked Andy about sources of inspiration. “Everything. Seriously. I look at the design of the restaurant where I’m eating, I look at the design of cars while I’m driving, I look at how a particular style of outfit looks hot on one person while the same looks silly on another, and work to figure out why… I seem to find inspiration in just about anything, provided I’m in the mood to receive inspiration. That’s important.”

When dealing with clients Andy mentions, “. . . Every client brings with them a set of ‘problems,’ but these are just the constraints we have to deal with in design. It’s really no problem at all, just a professional challenge. I require a fairly in-depth discovery process that my clients must be involved with and this prevents most problems from occurring later in the project. Those few clients that don’t avail themselves to me as much as necessary in the discovery generally get a lesser result, but that’s what they bargain for. I do what I can to explain cause and effect; what they ultimately do is their business – In more ways than one.”

As for webpage design interests, “My interest is in delivering the exact right solution to the clients’ needs and desires – and their customers’/audience’s needs and desires. Everything I do is beholden to that basic premise. As for what I dislike, I dislike when a Web page design is short-sighted or one-dimensional. I dislike it when the designer thinks that design means just the graphic presentation. The Web is a multi-faceted medium and Web designers have a responsibility to address all aspects and make sure that every level of experience is accounted for. This also means that people other than those with perfect eyesight, other than those who use a mouse, other than those who use a graphic browser, etc… are accounted for and are able to successfully interact with the page and consume its content. . . In short, I guess I dislike irresponsible design.”

Hopefully, it’s guys like Andy that improve all websites - even templates for them. Thankyou for the experienced point-of-view and some great answers.

Arthur Brown

Well I’m going to indulge myself today. I’m going to talk about something I do not understand, but I do that a lot. SEO! I try to read articles about the algorithms used by MSN, Yahoo, and Google and I get the part about LINKS, but I do not get that linking approximates relevancy values.

I can accept that links are good, but they can’t be as good as the algorithms have weighted them. When searches turn up results that take a lot of liberty with your search or keyword phrase, but you see these webpages have big rank and links, and you understand that rank is based in part on links, and that links themselves are further valued or devalued, then it gets a little far from relevancy.

I can understand some offered variations of the searchers keyword selection, because this is in part informational. I could search a phrase like “webpage templates” - which I did using all of the three search engines listed above - and get an array of results with keyword phrasing like “web page templates”, “web template”, or “pages of a website template”. But it is just as irrelevant as it is informational in many searches, sometimes more irrelevant.

If I look at the results of the three searches of “web page templates”, there are some similarities and some dissimilarities. On Google today the search for web page templates gives results whereby the first 7 results contained the word “free”, and the free was almost a part of the phrasing in most of the first seven. I don’t know why, but I do see that those first seven results offered by Google include some much looser variations of my search phrase: “Free Web Templates - Get free website templates and page layouts …”, “Free Website Templates, Free Photoshop Web Templates, Website Design”, “Offers free website templates and PhotoShop web page layouts”, “Free web templates by Art for the web”, “Free website templates from the Free templates experts”, “PageKits: Free Web Templates from . . .”, “Free Web Templates is the biggest free website template community online.” And one other similarity - they averaged 65,000 links apiece and had a PR average of about 6.25. Also #3 and #4 results were the same website - mmm. The #12 result on the Google results pages was also found on Yahoo at #30 and on MSN at #6. It had 4,150 links.

On Yahoo the “web page templates” search gave the same website the #1 position as on Google, but the word “free” did not appear in any of the of the results wording(?). And neither did the word “free” appear until the #5 result. The first seven averaged about 16,000 links if you leave out #5 which shows 9,130,000 links(?). Average PR was 4.0. But lookie here! “Offers web page templates”, “web page templates”, “web site layouts and templates”, “about web page templates”, “Simple Web Page Templates”, “Web page templates”, “Free web page templates” - less variation of my search phrase.

In MSN #1 was the same as in Yahoo and Google. The #3 and #4 positions had the same website as #3 and #4 on Google. The word “free” was mentioned in only two of the top seven positions, and not highlighted. Couldn’t find the number of links each of the first seven had, but three of them appeared in the other searches top seven as well. Now to the bastardization of my search phrase: “cool free web page templates”, “Web Site Templates”, “Web Page Template”, “web page templates”, “Web page template”, “Web page templates” and “Web Templates” - not as bad as Google - not as good as Yahoo.

Tempest in a tea cup? I like to search for what I’m looking for, not what is heavily linked and maybe in the ballpark of what I’m looking for. And, I believe I am not the ONLY one!!! This keyword phrase is much simpler than most that I need to search, and the ballpark is sometimes not even on the map. Which leads me to my Unified Field Theory - well my hunch - that a better measure of relevance (which really IS a good thing!!!) would be the click rates to websites that have the correct keywords, and further, click rates inside the website if these could be tallied by some mechanism. And you could factor out position # that might overenhance click rates and use some feature that discounts exhorbitant click rates from machines or the same IP addresses.

Okay, I am ready for the blast - how does my idea ignore the obvious. Must we Link or Die?

Arthur Browning

Web Templates Blog has the pleasure of sharing another interview with a notable Webpage Designer, Isaac Forman of TripleZero . In addition to designing some beautiful Webpages, Isaac is a major contributor to the EVolt.org Blog with many concise and knowledgeable articles to his credit. I could say a lot more about his candor and creativity but let’s start the interview:

About getting started in Web Design, “A friend gave me a spare modem of his to try about 11-12 years ago and after mucking around with a local BBS, I got online and created a few Geocities pages in Notepad. I learnt from viewing the source of other pages and a lot of trial and error. From there, I was a multimedia trainee and then started a company with another friend. Since that time, it’s just been work, work, work. . . My first ever site was a fan site for a band - it looked good, but I had not yet learned the ‘Content is King’ mantra. My first freelance gig was for an ISP owned by a sports celebrity, and I threw all of my creativity into it - again, it looked good, but wasn’t exactly all that usable and I learned from that.”

I asked Isaac about his thoughts on Web Standards, “With standards, I generally aim to play by the rules but ensure that a site still looks attractive. I don’t, however, obsessively check my pages for compliance though. Anytime that content is partly in the hands of a client, it becomes very difficult to ensure compliance is maintained anyway. . . I’d say that it’s always a compromise involving client expectations, needs of the audience, and cost of development.”

About Web 2.0, “I consider Web 2.0 to be sites that are using AJAX-type technology, but I do not have anything like this in my portfolio.” And new directions for Webpages, “I still think AJAX has a long way to come in permeating smaller sites before the Next Big Thing arrives. I’d suggest that the next leap will involve interactive video, similar to the way QTVR has worked with hotspots in the past. The internet is ideal for niche markets and television (at least in Australia) is really failing to provide for niche groups. I can see there being a real move towards video feeds online, but the gap between computer and television needs to be better addressed.”

Isaac mentioned he has not bought Webpage Templates, “I have created custom templates for other development companies. . . For clients on a budget or someone starting out in the industry, I think they would be a useful tool - either simply to get a quality site online, or as a learning process. A couple of times when stuck for ideas, I’ve browsed somewhere like Template Monster for inspiration, but never bought one. The main reason for this is that my clients are paying me for a unique site, and often their needs are quite specific. Some designers in the Template Monster catalogue are really very good at what they do.”

“Flash is not something that I develop personally, but I can appreciate its uses and have found opportunities to use it with clients. When used well, it can be a great tool for demonstrations, advertisements, and interactive elements. There would not really be any Flash-driven sites that I use on a daily basis though, but a few do use it for key elements - for example, NBA.com, ESPN, etc. Flash is obviously great for seamless presentation of video, loading data in the background and on-the-fly, and smooth, crisp animation that can’t really be presented in many other ways. A big negative is often the loss of back/forward buttons in many Flash movies, and the inability to bookmark or send a friend to a specific section in most longer presentations - I think a few of these issues come down to the developer’s use of the tool, however.”

“I’m inspired by other web sites, as well as design books and magazines. Often it only takes a colour scheme or shape to get a design started. Occasionally I find it a challenge to maintain motivation throughout a project. Sometimes if a job drags on, or changes keep coming through, it can be difficult to keep the same level of enthusiasm as when starting a fresh project, especially when I am always working on 10-20 clients in any given week.”

Isaac mentioned his main interests in Wed Design, “Content and attractive presentation are what I look for and appreciate. I like seeing people presenting a common set of content (e.g., a blog) in a different way to everyone else. Also, I get a lot more enjoyment from the challenge of designing a site with a lot of visual elements than I do trying to come up with something for a basic site which might be limited to title, content, token image and navigation. I dislike having to incorporate awkward ads into a site, whether they’re banner ads or fixed-format text ads. Oh, and “click here” in links is a pet-hate.”

Having seen his work and read many of his articles I offer many thanks to Isaac for this interview.

Arthur Brownng

Template Monster washed its hands of Ultravertex.com, citing Ultarvertex.com’s unethical business practices. Ultravertex.com, an image provider for webpage designers, had been a partner for some years with Template Monster. The basis of the partnership was a contract whereby Template Monster purchased an exclusive license from Ultravertex.com which entitled Template Monster customers to a free account with the image provider.

Ultravertex.com was allegedly barring Template Monster customers from downloading its graphic image files. Numerous complaints and requests sent to Ultravertex.com had gone unanswered, according to Template Monster’s customer reports. Template Monster states that it tried to investigate the situation but received no response to its several inquiries of Ultravertex.com. Additionally, Template Monster states it was recently made aware of Ultravertex.com’s alleged misuse of images that they do not own. Further, Template Monster gave notice to everyone involved that they have dissolved their partnership with Ultravertex.com and will have no further dealings with them.

Template Monster made the decision to break off the partnership agreement and believes they may well have to go to court to protect their customers and themselves. Template Monster removed all the links to Ultravertex.com from the TM webpages. And Template Monster issued a recommendation to all of its clients that they no longer use any images from Ultravertex.com.

“We are extremely upset with this situation,� says David Braun, CEO of Template Monster. “The free account with the image provider was a great bonus for our clients. Unfortunately, we have no other choice but to break off this partnership in order not to mislead our clients. We are very sorry about the situation but we do promise to provide a similar bonus for all of our clients as soon as possible.�

I personally would like to know what Template Monster will offer its customers as a replacement bonus. And, readers, if you have info on Ultravertex.com send me a comment.

Arthur Browning

Happy 4th of July to our readers from the USA! Since I am a patriotic citizen of the USA, the blog entry will be short today. I have to wave the flag, get to a barbecue, and make sure the ribs are done correctly. I need some pool time and I will drink some very cold domestic beer! Please guess my favorite. One thing is for sure, there will be no shortage of bikinis, music, or potato salad. One political remark - I don’t always agree with George Bush, but I’m glad we didn’t wait another 10 years to start cleaning up the leftovers of the oil corrupted Middle East.

Arthur Browning

WebTemplatesBlog.com is happy to print our interview with Pat Heard, a notable Webpage designer of FullAhead who has also designed webpage templates. Pat has donated several of the webpage templates that he has designed to Open Source Web Design, and that organization has been kind enough to offer them free of charge.

I asked Pat about his work and how he got into template design - “I got into web design by accident. I studied computer programming at school, and in one of my jobs, they also needed me to maintain the website. I discovered that I loved the combination of programming and design.”

Pat continues, “That was about 10 years ago, so everything I know about the design part is self taught. As for how I got into open source templates - I stumbled on oswd.org about 2 years ago and decided it was time for me to learn css, tableless design. They had a contest running, so I decided to enter it. It took me 2 painful weeks, but at the end, I was able to enter ‘Drifting’, and was pretty surprised when it won. Since then, I’ve been doing templates as a break from paying clients because they give me the freedom to do whatever I want, and they’re a good opportunity to learn.”

Two other pages Pat designed are at Fullahead “Ecostructure Financial” and “The League of Extraordinary Bartenders”. Have a look at these, then tour Pat’s website. Pat also has some very helpful and concise words for designers and people new to the web in his brief info articles, case in point, his info on “Coding”.

I asked Pat about pricing on his work: a website design like “North Shore”, “template along with subpages would run around $600 USD. That site was actually a template project, so I created the code, and then gave it to my client for him to create the subpages, so it ended up costing him $350. ”

We briefly swapped ideas and Pat added, “My system is a PC, but that’s not so much by choice as by default. It’s just what I learned on and I haven’t bothered making the switch to Mac. I don’t use templates because I would prefer to create the design myself.” I asked Pat for his opinion on a good source for images, he mentioned Stock.xchng.

I have some affinity for his webpages using Web 2.0, and asked about that look, “If you’re curious about Web 2.0, try doing a search in google for some examples. Basically web 2.0 is a buzzword that describes sites that are: 1. Simple, with emphasis on useability (large fonts and headers) 2. Use soft colours, and not too many. 3. Use rounded shapes in the interface.”

It’s always a pleasure for me to talk with a designer who is creative and informative - and where there are no dumb questions. Pat is that kind of designer.

Arthur Browning