The form was laid out as of the image to the right. A text box with a small button underneath stating “register email”. Now you would think it was obvious to enter an email address here but it seems not here are some of the entries we received from this form.

• fish
• jobs
• Crewe
• Stoke
• Sledges – funnily enough around the time of the snow!
• Circus
• flea repelent
• drinks bottles
• african land snails – wtf

This just proves how when working for the web you have to really make things so so obvious to a user or they end up using things in the incorrect manner. Now you could validate the email addresses but you think its only a simple form how can it perceived otherwise – but obvioulsy that isn’t the case.

Maybe a user sees a textbox and automatically thinks arhhh a search – hence the results above. Intresting? … or not?

As you can see from the title of this site I class myself as a developer but why? Put simply to make a website function you DO NOT need design it just makes it easier on the eye, prime example is cssnakedday (take away all design/colours/images and the site should still be workable). To get a website on the internet you do not need any design skill – a websites main role is the functionality and linking of pages – a lot of the time it would be better to strip the so called design.

The “designer” just makes the site clearer and gives it that warmth and ease of use for the visitor. From my few years experience a lot of websites are designed by people from a print background that have adapted with the change where designing for web is a completely different kettle of fish – some grasp it better than others.

I admit to not being the worlds best designer however I don’t think as a developer you can ignore what is looking good on your page and what is looking bad. When developing a site you see the same pages over and over again so I think this hinders your capabilities of a designer. If you are looking at the same thing over and over again repeatedly you are going to miss little things plus I’m concentrating on functionality of how to get things to function than the smaller design led changes.

For example if you had two days to develop a site I’m going to concentrate on functionality/coding and split my time according and make that my priority say 80% that gives me 20% to apply styles. That 20% isn’t going to be enough to apply all styles and design to a page

So I guess it comes to down to priorities if you are building a data driven website which requires functionality you need to spend more time to get it to work than applying the design as without the functionality you have no website at all – hence why I see myself as a web developer – that design means nothing if you have no structure it just helps a hell of a lot in getting traffic to your site.

Although design is an important factor without the development knowledge – you have no website. I spend a lot of my time creating layouts and styling using css – is this design? Yes but I’m yet to met a designer that can produce semantic HTML/CSS no doubt they are out there though. I could go on and on but I’ll leave it there…for today

Things I am not are “A techie”