I hadn’t planned on buying the Smashing Book #2 before this weekend. As yet I have no opinion on the content of the books as I have yet to read them, my choice to not purchase them before was simply due to having too much other reading material, so I tend to be picky over what I add to the reading list.
In over 4 years of doing web design professionally I’ve always been a little adverse to opening Illustrator and doing any vector work whatsoever. I’d learnt Photoshop whilst at University and I am used to working in pixels, except for a slight foray into Macromedia Freehand (remember that?).
But recently I’ve been trying to understand Illustrator a little more, first by editing existing vector images and then creating basic icons, but this week I went a little mad and tried a full blown illustration. The result of which you can see below, or on the final site for a childminder in Hartlepool:
Yesterday I received an email from a client whose friend was having trouble with their current web development company. Without naming the site or the people involved I can say that the friend is a person who has been in the public eye and the site is a small ecommerce website.
The current web company takes months to fix any problems, such as those involved with the ability to purchase online. A small text change is being quoted at £175, and once agreeing to allow the site to be moved they quoted £10,000 to hand things over, but apparently not an exact copy of the site due to not wanting to give away ‘secret code’. Doing so will apparently open them up to hackers.
I’m a designer working for what is predominantly an SEO company, so I pretty much sit on the fence between the two. So it frustrates me when I read so much bad press about SEO within the design community, mainly by people that are ill informed about the industry, even though it so closely relates to their own.
The problem is that most designers have limited exposure to the good side of the SEO industry and too much of the bad. Seemingly some designers forget how the bad eggs in our industry affect people’s perception of us, and thus don’t get that the same happens in the SEO industry too.
But there are good SEO’s that are trying hard to work within the rules and provide their clients with an excellent service and achievable results. They, like designers, attend conferences and read blogs to ensure they keep learning in what is an even more changeable environment than a designer or developer must face.