Real Kato Blog: The Web: Real Kato Web Design

I have a commission to make a web site. Unfortunately, it's not a paying gig.

I am making a web site for Anna's wedding. It's a pretty simple deal, but she's only giving me a week, and I'm sitting here wasting time writing blog entries. But I have several things to write about today, and I don't want to deprive my small but faithful group of readers.

I haven't really done a whole lot of Javascript stuff until recently. It's pretty easy, if you know how to program in C. Now I'm starting to look at it more, and I'm amazed see the amount of amateurish hackery that passes for web programming. I was looking for a canned script for making popup menus, and I found a bazillion sites that claimed to have the Perfect Solution. But nearly all of them were seriously badly written. It occurs to me that most web designers are not really programmers, or maybe they're people who've taught themselves programming. I hate to sound like a snob, but just because you can put together a twenty line script doesn't make you a "programmer". That would be like me claiming to be a tennis player because I own a can of tennis balls. (I only own them to put in the dryer with my pillows, to make the pillows fluffier.)

And then there are the people who are programmers but not designers. There are web sites that are technically sound, but horrendously gaudy, with flashing colors and an overload of special effects. Hey folks, just because you can make something animated doesn't mean you should.

And then there are those people who just make their whole site in Flash. Those sites tend to be very stylish and tightly designed, because Flash allows designers to create something without stooping into geekdom. Why isn't there a free program to make this kind of stuff? Perhaps because the people who make free programs, the open-source programmers, are protective of their geekdom. It's the same reason why Linux isn't easy to use; if it were, geeks wouldn't be into it.

When the wedding site is ready, I'll let youse guys take a look and critique it. If I'm dishing out the criticism, I might as well be ready to receive some too.

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