Do you need a designer or a code-monkey?
It’s an important question. Consider the following:
- Do you need a professional to help you design a great web presence?
- Do you expect the person or company you hire to make the decisions regarding the best layout and presentation for your site?
- Are you willing to pay for their expertise regarding standards and accessibility?
or
- Do you have a specific design planned?
- Do you have your content exactly the way you want it, including all text?
- Are you wanting your plan implemented exactly with no deviation?
If you answer ‘yes’ to more of the first set of questions, you’re looking for a designer. If you answered ‘yes’ to more of the second set, you’re looking for a code-monkey. The difference? You hire a designer for their professional expertise regarding design, layout, and standards, you hire a code-monkey to make your idea work on the web in any way possible.
Before you start firing off a 3 page missive about my use of the term “code-monkey”, please let me explain: I have no problem being hired as a code-monkey. I’m in a small business, in a small community, and if that’s what my customer wants, that’s what I’ll deliver. I also make sure they know my opinion concerning their chosen design/content. Usually, they listen and I can work with them to deliver a better site.
Every now and then, I can spend hours straight with a client, and they will still insist on me implementing a site with bad layout, bad color, and even worse…bad grammar. I had this happen very recently. I couldn’t even convince the client to use correct grammar in their text. I tried for hours begging for simple changes to their content alone. In the end, nothing changed, and I wasted 4 hours that I can’t bill for because all this client wanted was a code-monkey to deliver their idea in an online format. In a perfect world, I would have walked away in the first 30 minutes after having told them that perhaps I was not the best company to work with them. But I feel more strongly about helping my clients, and my community, than I do about wasting non-billable hours, and fought for as long as the client would allow.
What can you learn from this? When you are working with your designer, please value their expertise and opinion. You hire your accountant and trust their knowledge in making decisions about your finances. You go to a physician and trust their knowledge concerning your health. You hire a plumber and trust he/she knows which pipe to replace and how to do it to make everything work right.
Trust your designer to help you deliver a great web site. And if you know right off that you want a code-monkey to implement your plan exactly as presented, then please, please tell your chosen design company this FIRST.
- Grab the book closest to you.
- Open to page 123, look down to the 5th sentence.
- Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog.
- Include the title and the author’s name.
“Beside him, Alice began to cry. It was the sort of out-of-breath weeping a tired child might make. One who is used to punishment.”
from the paperback edition of Cell by Stephen King.
Meme from Book Through Thursday
