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Apr 18, 2011

A Sordid Past

JavaScript has come a long way from its humble and (quite frankly) sketchy roots. From the start, circa 1995, JavaScript was the Frankenstein monster of web development tools — a sort of necessary evil cobbled together to do certain web development tasks, but never truly appreciated beyond this rudimentary utility. As a programmer, I’ll never forget my first encounter with JavaScript: it became instantly clear that the language threw away all of the good programming practices about which I had spent years learning, and traded coherence for a smaller barrier to entrance; i.e., they dumbed it down (or created it as something pretty dumb in the first place) so that any idiot with a text editor could include some fancy effect in their web pages. Instant gratification at the expense of standard programming practices. We the programmers got out our torches and pitchforks and made a lot of noise about the evils of JavaScript, in those early days. Of course, we also all used it to create fancy effects in our web pages…

Nowadays, JavaScript has grown into a halfway respectable language, but, more importantly, has grown into an indispensable and highly evolved tool for web design and development. The beautiful thing, from the perspective of a web developer, is that other, smarter people have wrestled the language’s bad parts into submission, and have developed incredibly useful libraries for the rest of us to use in our web design projects.

Some JavaScript libraries are actually serious programming frameworks, such as Prototype and MooTools. These frameworks can help the hardcore web application developer control their JavaScript and make programming it far easier, neater, and trouble-free. They also have their share of goodies that make it easy to add effects and bling to your website. Check out MooTools’ Forge for some nifty examples of animation effects.

And this is the sort of thing I’ll focus on from here on in: JavaScript bling that’s easy to add to your web designs.

JavaScript Libraries that Bring the Bling

 

Screenshot of a YUI accordion

Web giant Yahoo got into the JavaScript library game fairly early on, and now has a hulking set of tools you can use in your web designs. The Yahoo YUI library features accordion animation effects, drag and drop functionality, various slider, button, and other control widgets, calendars, charts, trees, tabs, as well as helpful components for layout and container management. Truly a Swiss Army knife for web design.

 

Screenshot of some Dojo sliders

Dojo is another magnificent toolkit, sporting lots of useful and easy-to-use user interface goodies, such as form widgets, tabs, fancy text boxes, sliders, progress bars, drag and drop functionality, menus, and calendars.

Similarly, Scriptaculous, Rico, and MochiKit all sport an ample supply of widgets and animation effects that can be relatively easily dropped into your web designs. Check out the many animation effects available from Scriptaculous.

No exploration of JavaScript libraries would be complete without the granddaddy of them all: jQuery. You’d be hard-pressed to find a website out there currently that doesn’t use jQuery in some fashion. And together with its UI library jQuery UI, you can do everything with it from simply including widgets to theming sites to developing entire web apps.

More Specific JavaScript Libraries

 

Screenshot of a lightbox in use

The libraries above are genuine tookits with lots of tools. There are also narrower libraries for more specific tasks. Lightboxes have become a standard means for displaying photos on the web, and there are some good JavaScript libraries out there for your use as a designer. Two I’ve used before are Lightbox 2 and FancyBox.

Closing on a fanciful note, I introduce to you the Raphael JavaScript library — a library that allows you to manipulate vector graphics on the web. Check out this entirely cool vector pie chart. It really pushes the boundaries on what JavaScript can bring to your web design.

Nov 18, 2010

You may have a good idea about some of the costs for your new website, but do you know the entire cost?  Is the total cost $15,000? More? Once you know the strategy for your site—the why and how it fits into your marketing plan—the cost of actually implementing a website project can be broken down into several parts. There are the domain name and hosting fees, the design costs, the build and possible software costs, and the cost to develop and maintain the content.

There are lots of vendors that offer inexpensive websites. GoDaddy.com, a popular domain name registrar, advertises websites for just $5 a month. But what exactly are they offering? Does a template-based five-page website fill your need? Or, as with most companies, do you need a website tailored to your business, your processes, and your target market?

Strategy

We start every web project with a creative brief/project platform that serves as a guiding document during the creation of the site. The platform articulates the target audiences, strategies, goals and objectives for the website as one communication vehicle within your overall marketing communication plan. The creative brief forms the foundation for a site plan, which is the roadmap of the information architecture. The site plan defines where the content lives and will describe the organization of the site, including sections, pages and navigation. The site structure is designed to facilitate a user-friendly experience and to create an experience representative of the company. The goal is to make the company – and the people who comprise it – accessible to its target audiences, making information easy to find and making visitors to the site feel welcome and valued. Once you have your creative brief/project platform, you have a document that lets you compare costs for  key components of the implementation.

Image via Wikipedia

Website Name and Hosting

The easiest costs to determine are the domain names (URLs) and hosting. We prefer a slightly more expensive registrar for domain names — one that provides greater service and better management of multiple domain names and DNS services than the $1.99 discount provider (that may actually sell your domain if you forget to renew on time). Likewise with a website hosting company. You want to look at customer service, security, backups, and flexibility when choosing a hosting company and package. It also helps if you know if you will be adding landing pages or sub-domains. Some hosts charge a second hosting fee for these and some do not. For large companies, and those doing significant online sales, a proprietary software solution and dedicated servers can add significant costs each month.

Design

The next major cost is the design and build. These expenses often go together as it is more efficient to have the two work together rather than risk choosing a design that is difficult to implement, or having coding done that doesn’t meet your design needs.

Design can be as little as the cost of a predefined template for a few hundred dollars (think real estate or corner coffee shop), to many thousands of dollars for multiple graphics, photos, page templates and style sheets. The possibilities are endless. Imagine the design hours spent each day at Google on the home page doodle graphic alone.

Website build and coding

Website build and coding is more about the size of the site and functionality. Do you want a small static site that almost never changes, or a site with frequent text changes, or do you need a robust site with multiple connections to other systems such as ecommerce, shipping, billing, and inventory? The more functionality in your website the greater the cost will be and the longer the build time. Do you want to manage your own content? That is, do you want to be able to edit the stories and copy, update and change the photos, and do this without learning programming language or HTML? If yes, you want a CMS (Content Management System).

Content

What will your content be? (Content includes all the writing and images on a site.) Someone needs to determine what stories will appear on your website, in what organization, and how to speak to your audiences. Do you have images that will work with your design? There is significant writing. Each page and section will need to be written, entered, proofed, tested and updated. Who will do this, and will it take days or months to complete? New content will need to be developed on an ongoing schedule and the entire site will need to be maintained. Will you be able to do that additional work or do you want to hire a writer, proofreader and editor?

A quick search found more than a dozen website all-in-one packages for easy purchase. Each suggested ease of use and low monthly fee. None suggested content development, writing or custom design. Several even suggest easy to use design tools — leaving the buyer to actually design the site from pre-developed templates. So as you plan your website project, don’t forget to include all the pieces when comparing services and prices. What others have you found? I invite you to share your experience.