Images, Text, Site Design Plans, and Clients

Holy wow! Talk about a wide range of topics today. I guess how I could handle this is just go through each reading one-by-one. So, here we go...

Creating a Site Design Plan

Asking the client what they and the user will be using the website for is perhaps the best starting point of interviewing a potential client. If they can not answer one of these questions, then it is going to be extremely difficult to figure out what the website is going to do.
Creating goals for the site helps put together a list of priorities of what the website needs to accomplish. Just as Rome wasn't built in a day (cliche, I know), a website can not be perfect the first time that you launch it. These things take a lot of time. Sometimes your clients will be understanding towards this, a lot of times they will not. For this project, it's best to find someone who is.

Top Ten Questions You Should Ask Your Clients 

First things first, in my previous encounters with clients, starting out I thought that I would only have to meet with the clients a couple times. This is absolutely not true. It doesn't matter who your client is, circumstances are going to change in your site design plan (sorry to burst anyone's bubbles). Plan on meeting with your client (or contacting them) several times over the course of this next project. The forum mentioned that budget and deadline are important in interviewing your client. I personally think that holding off on budget until the end of the first meeting - it's just tacky to start off with "So, how much money do you have?" Plus, this project won't be compensated anyway. I completely agree with asking them how they will update the site. Unless you plan on managing this site for them forever, someone will be taking it over and you need to know how much experience they have before you know how detailed the site can be or what you use to build it.

Lesson 3: Adding Text and Images 

I'm just going to throw this out there right now, I think that Dreamweaver is the lazy way of coding. Not saying I never use it, but it is so incredibly simple to use to build webpages. That being said, Dreamweaver can be very dangerous and you will wind up with a very ugly code if you don't use it right. This chapter goes over a basic introduction to adding text and changing the fonts of them using the CSS Rule Dialog box. It actually made me realize why my text continued to show up in Times instead of Helvetica like I wanted on my webpage. This allows you to change the font so that if it is not installed on a certain computer, it will change to a font that is. It talks about how the most appropriate image format for the web is GIF because it does not ruin the quality and how to add images onto a page as well.