Steve Finkelstein wrote:
Hi all,
This is more of a conceptual based inquiry. I'm currently working on
some projects which require me to build system 'X' prior to any
(X)HTML/CSS/graphics are available to me. A lot of the time, I just
garble up default tables/forms/images to replace what the designer will
be ultimately adjusting. It's certainly a lot simpler to have someone
come to you with the CSS/HTML and then building on top of that.
I was curious how do you folks who strictly do development and not
designing, strategically work with a designer in this fashion? Do you
have a skeleton you follow or preload some existing templates and then
code around that? If there's even a book which focuses on such concepts,
I'd be more than happy to purchase and read it.
OK, I'm a recent list subscriber so feel free to dump this straight to
the bit bucket, but here's my 2c. We work with a lot of Web designers
and it's always a challenge. We've been using content management systems
heavily (we like MODx, but most are good depending on what you're
looking for), and now that we have, we'll NEVER go back. We can have a
designer working on a template and a developer adding functionality to
that template at totally different times, with different goals. Changing
the template doesn't hurt anything, provided the conceptual elements are
all there. (For instance, you can't pull sidebar dynamic data into a
page with no sidebar, obviously!)
It really does help a lot when we work with both sides because we can
define how we want things to work VERY closely, and we know that as long
as the designers stay within those bounds, the sites will work no matter
what we want to do with them.
I suppose the answer would thus be 'yes, we have a skeleton', basically
what's imposed by the limits of a CMS, but they aren't very significant.
We have to be careful about what kinds of code elements we use, and
where, and we have to make sure nobody tries to do silly things like
using AJAX to pull CSS files on the fly for dynamic page data sets, or
trying to embed large parts of the site's functionality in Flash files.
However, we don't really feel restricted by those things, and it's made
the quality of what we produce much higher, and much easier for
customers to understand.
Just my 2c.
Regards,
Chad
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