How to Evaluate a Web Designer’s Work

Many times, the selection of someone to work the technological end of your library’s website is done by a non-technological person. This can be quite exasperating, considering the many obstacles that need to be overcome just to write the job description; this certainly doesn’t help you rate applicants and their work. Below are some tips on what to look for when hiring staff to maintain your library’s website.

Seven Tips for the Technically Challenged: Tips 1-3

Tip #1: Require a list of links to real, working websites.

Don’t accept links to websites which are in the “draft” stages, or portfolios they’ve set up on their personal homepage. You want to see things that recent clients have consented to work with as part of a legitimate business; not “dream websites” the designer created to impress prospective employers.

Tip #1a: Also, when requesting this list, request information about the fees charged for development of each website. If the designer charges by the hour, make sure to request the amount of time spent implementing each website. Compare the time and price with the product.

Tip #2: Determine if it’s a template or real design

With a really good web editing program supported by templates, anyone can boast web designer status. The sign of a truly good designer, though, is the ability to customize a design to meet a client’s needs rather than letting the technology design the website.

Look for obvious structural similarities among the websites they’ve given to you for review.

• each homepage/subpage has the same components (usually in the same locations)
• there is no usage of a company logo or other unique design elements
• there are unnecessary elements, such as a “search” box for a website less than ten pages

The examples above are newspaper sites: the State Journal in Frankfort, Kentucky, and The Daily Record in Wooster, Ohio. Both have the same components: Sections, MarketPlace, Services, Weather Central, Poll Question, log in/log out, and archive buttons. Because the design is based on a template, many of the links on the State Journal page go nowhere, the “search this site” only searches the homepage, and besides the newspaper banner, there is no identifying information about the origin of the newspaper, its staff, or contact information.

Tip #3: Check the coding.

Even the technologically challenged can do this.

• Open a page in your web browser
• Select the option to view the coding behind the page (in Internet Explorer, it is View/Source; in Netscape and Firefox, it is View/Page Source). This will open a document in Word Pad or some similar program.
• Within this program, select “Find…” (usually within the “Edit” menu)
• You’ll want to do searches for the following:

<table>

Finding or not finding this indicates how the designer chose to structure the page. (Note: Make sure to choose a page that doesn’t have a table in the content.)

Fundamentally, you would want to avoid finding this tag in the coding, but if you locate this once in the coding, it is OK. Many web critics claim that tables-based layout is a bad idea because of the multiple issues it causes, such as preventing Accessibility, adding extra coding which adds to the file’s size, and browser compatibility problems. However, if your library has a tight budget, attracting someone proficient with CSS positioning (the opposite of tables-based layout) may not be feasible.

If you locate the <table> tag more than once during your search, avoid this designer. Multiple uses of tables within one page’s layout are a sure sign that the designer is a novice.

alt=

Finding or not finding this indicates whether or not this designer is aware of Accessibility issues and/or network compatibility problems. (Note: Make sure to select a page with images before attempting to locate this tag.)

The “alt” tag is text placed within an image’s coding to describe the image, in the event that the image does not load properly, or that the user is blind and needs a description for their screen reader (a process similar to that done by a television/descriptive video).

If the webpage has multiple images, you’ll want to find the same number of “alt” tags.

DOCTYPE

This tag tells the browser which HTML or XHTML specification the document uses.

This tag needs to be present in order for browsers to convert the coding into a viewable webpage; most of the time, web editing software inserts this tag in the coding without the designer knowing it. However, if the designer is hand-coding the page using WordPad or NotePad, it can be overlooked, and its lack can cause page display problems within certain browsers.

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