Re: [PHP] Strategy when working with designer(s)?

Steve Finkelstein wrote:
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.

This is just my opinion. I have only ever worked with a limited set of professional designers...Your mileage may vary.

Having worked with a designer I very much respect for almost two years now, my only real suggestion is to make sure you write very standards-compliant xhtml. Lay out your pages so that they flow from top to bottom without any formatting whatsoever (think extreme simplicity). Output data naturally - tabular data in tables, paragraphs in p tags, headings in hN tags, inputs with labels, etc. Conceptually different parts can be split into div tags too. (Like <div id="header">Page Title</div>, <div id="content">Page data</div> etc.)

It should look something like:

Global Header

* Page 1 link
* Page 2 link
* Page 3 link
* Page 4 link

Page Data



Here's why:
- A good web designer can work absolute magic with CSS - they can turn a well written xhtml page into a beautiful page that looks consistent across all modern browsers. (I'm lucky enough to work day-to-day with an absolute design wizard.)
- It's very accessible - even simple mobile browsers screen readers and will have no problems with it.
- If you don't like the work the designer has done, you can hire another and plug-in different style sheets.

Depending on the calibre of designer, I think that integration may be a bit of a headache in the end though.

jon
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