Interview: CHRISTINE ANDERSSEN
Web Templates Blog welcomes Christine Anderssen of Johannesburg. This interview is the latest in our series of interviews with web designers. Christine is the owner of Tailor Made 4 You.
“I fell into web design by accident about 3 years ago. My husband and I imported some flashlights from China and we had to set up a website to promote the product. It was originally a one page frontpage site and has since changed considerably. But I am an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience, mostly in the management side – project management, quality management, test management and so on, although I started with programming a long time ago. Somehow I just got sucked into the Internet and started to do websites on a part time basis. Recently I resigned my
corporate job and am now running my own website design business.”
“Well, since I am not one of those Internet veterans with more than 8 years of experience my first site is (unfortunately) still in operation. Or let me put it this way, the first site I did for a paying client. I am ashamed to admit that I used Iframes to do the whole site. Yikes. Don’t tell anyone! I am busy redoing the site at the moment and soon all traces of my sins would hopefully have disappeared.”
Are you secializing in any area? “Yes! I specialise in building websites using either Joomla or WordPress. It is just so quick and easy to get websites going using either one of these tools. This helps me keep my costs down. Marketwise I focus a lot on small to medium businesses.”
“Because of my PHP and MYSQL skills I also do a lot of custom development. Recently I had to develop something again and decided to investigate some Development Frameworks and now I do CakePHP as well. I decided to use Cake because of its good documentation (they really upgraded their documentation from a couple of months ago), because I don’t need to learn a new programming language and because it supports PHP 4 and will therefore still run on the majority of shared hosts out there. I really love it!”
Where do you get your art for these webpages? “Because I use Joomla or WordPress I work a lot with pre-designed templates, however, I often do modify the templates considerably. I make use of stock art – www.bigstockphoto.com is my favourite – or photos that the client provides. These are often not very good quality though, which means that Photoshop comes in really handy.”
What will be the next big development in webpage design? “I have to admit that I am normally so knuckled down in my own projects that when I pick up my head again the latest wave has just overtaken us. I am still battling to come to grips with concepts like Web 2.0….”
Have you ever worked with website templates? “Yes, I love working with templates. I have actually written an article about the pros and cons of using commercial templates and how to use them, ‘Custom Website Design or Website Templates’ which was published on Webpronews. It must have touched a nerve since I still get traffic from that article. In summary, I feel that website templates are a great way to get a good looking website. That is probably why I am now moving away from calling myself a website designer and rather a website developer since I definitely do not concentrate on the graphic design aspects that much but more on building functionality.”
What website template providers have you tried? “I love the Templatemonster templates, but I can also spend hours on the OSWD website. I have also used BoxedArt but that was a while ago. But you need to remember that I don’t use the templates as they are, I convert them to Joomla format to use with my Joomla websites.”
What was your experience with them? “I often find that the templates (the TemplateMonster and BoxedArt) are very well designed from a look-and-feel point of view. I constantly marvel at the quality of the graphics and the way that the templates ‘work’ from a graphical design perspective, however, when you dig into their insides you run into lots and lots of tables, inline styles (if you are lucky) and lots of tags. This is why I tend to then just use the graphical design and convert it to a format that suits a CMS.”
What do you think about Flash technology? “I love Flash where it is appropriate. For example, you almost cannot have a site promoting a movie these days without it being flash! And it is great! You can have a ‘mini-movie’ experience on the Internet. Other sites where flash is almost the standard – kids’ sites, online games sites and rock band sites!”
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? “The disadvantages are that
a) you need to have the flash player installed
b) probably need to have broadband
c) flash movies are not easily indexed by the search engines.
I think the biggest mistake that a business can make is to have their whole website designed in flash technology. I think we are probably moving away from that (luckily) but every now and again I come across a business website that brings up the ominous white screen of death saying : ‘Loading….’ Don’t they realise that a visitor makes up his or her mind in a couple of split seconds whether they want to visit a site or not? You should make it as easy as possible for someone to visit your site and find the info. And if all of your content is hidden inside a flash movie the search engines will very rarely pick it up and offer it in the search results.”
“Where I am located in South Africa most Internet Users still access the Internet through 56K Modems, and asking them to download anything before they can visit a site is just plain dumb. Rather than have an ugly site that is directly accessible!”
What are your sources of inspiration? “I get the Sitepoint newsletters and devour them religously. Apart from that I also like to browse around sites like www.websitesthatsuck.com and www.webdesignfromscratch.com. I tend to not frequent specific sites but rather surf when I am looking for specific info. My Browser history of about 2 weeks ago is filled with references to sites containing info about CakePHP and other development frameworks since that is when I was looking for specific info on development frameworks.”
What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered? “Lots and lots of tough situations in my corporate job, but not with my website designs yet.”
Thankyou Christine. Coincidentally I recently asked someone to handle a project just as you desribed – creating a css & cms webpage from a template that wasn’t yet supporting those functions. I believe that is where the most bang for the buck is(as we say in the USA). I should have consulted with you. Hope you will visit with us again sometime.
The Bad Boy of Templates,
Arthur Browning
