Hi

As a web designer about to start business and designing various letterheads
and all that I would like to know how many people are registered members of
the BWDMA in the UK and if you are is it ok to place their logo on your
letterheads if you are a personal member - or is it only allowed if you are
a corporate member? Similarly if you are just a personal member can you use
the logo on your business website? I would guess not.

Also the BWDMA mentions training for web designers is being considered for
the professional membership. This, in my view is badly needed. As a
registered architect I know the benefits of professional registration and
regulation and the affect on reducing cowboys. In fact no one can actually
even call themselves an architect unless they are registered with the ARB
which regulates architects. Once a similar regulation in made legally
binding in this country for web designers the better it will be for good
designers. Sounds like a new way forward for web design is just around the
corner. I just hope qualification requirements arent as high as they are for
architects!

Finally heres the BWDMA website address, just doing my part to advertise
their presence and ancourage others to join!

http://www.bwdma.co.uk/

--
Regards

Nigel Stutt
Web Site Designer

Email: nstutt@nstutt.freeserve.co.uk
Web: http://www.nstutt.freeserve.co.uk

I noticed that Message-ID: <c95e8b$5jc$1@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk> from Nats
contained the following:

Hmmm...
197: <!-- RH Side Starts -->
198: <table class="lhside" cellspacing="0">


--
Geoff Berrow (put thecat out to email)
It's only Usenet, no one dies.
My opinions, not the committee's, mine.
Simple RFDs http://www.ckdog.co.uk/rfdmaker/

Nats wrote:
[snip]
No one is going to stop untrained & unregistered people designing &
developing & publishing web sites. There aren't the same safety considerations
as, say, driving or architecture. (Not that such regulation stops modern
buildings falling on people and killing them!)

It is possible that some organisations will have their own restrictions. After
all, if your organisation comes under the DDA 1995, then you need to be sure
that your developers know how to keep you on the right side of the law.

Chuckle! Try running the HTML & CSS past the W3C validators! It doesn't even
validate as Transitional. (Yet they refer to these validators in their
accessibility section). And just see what they use as alt-text for logos &
buttons, etc!

It is as nasty a bit of web design & development as I've seen recently.
Perhaps the reason they want web designers to be trained is that they are fed
up with the ones they have been using for their own site.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

Way down deep in the middle of the congo, Nats and a hippo took an apricot a
guava and a mango. Stuck it with the others and he danced a dainty tango...

I would not want to be associated with them. Their site is shite!

On Sat, 29 May 2004 14:27:31 +0100, Saint Firk
<rupert.murdoch@sky.com> wrote:

c'mon be fair, it's not as bad as the BCS, an organisation much more
incompetent about web based IT than those marketing folk.

It looks to me like professional organisations in the web world, are a
big joke best avoided, and do you your best to educate everyone
outside the industry about the fact.

Jim.

I noticed that Message-ID: <40b88f79.583075768@news.individual.net> from
Jim Ley contained the following:

Maybe the W3C should set one up?

I have to teach AVCE from September. The web design section of the
course specification makes interesting reading.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jon.mar...BUnit%2B13.pdf
--
Geoff Berrow (put thecat out to email)
It's only Usenet, no one dies.
My opinions, not the committee's, mine.
Simple RFDs http://www.ckdog.co.uk/rfdmaker/

On Sat, 29 May 2004 17:07:29 +0100, Geoff Berrow
<blthecat@ckdog.co.uk> wrote:

W3C don't have a whole load of resources for that sort of thing, and
I'm not surely they really have the reason to move away from their
company trade consortia roots - public-evangelist@w3.org would listen
I'm sure.

Doesn't seem too bad at all. of course the big problem is the gap
between theory and application - as we saw the BWMDA and BCS etc. know
about accessibility and standards etc. They just don't know how to do
anything about it.

Jim.

I noticed that Message-ID: <40b8baa4.594127129@news.individual.net> from
Jim Ley contained the following:

Perhaps you didn't read it all. Absolutely no mention of CSS whatsoever
and there appears to be a great emphasis on 'software tools' The
college only has FrontPage available. This is an advanced level
qualification.



Creating a Website
As time moves on there are more and more wizards available to help you
with the creation of
a website. You should be aware of what wizards can provide and how you
can edit what they
produce to create your final product. You will also learn to identify
situations where use of a
wizard is efficient, and others where it is more efficient to use the
basic tools.

Working with HTML
The basic tool which you will learn to use to create your site is html.
You may create your
html pages using a simple text editor, although it is more likely that
you will choose one of
the web page editors. They have WYSIWYG and other features which make
your task much
simpler. You will learn, however, to have some grasp of ‘raw’ html so
that you can, if
necessary, make simple changes to pages by editing the source html using
a text editor.

Evaluation

Studying commercial websites will help you to judge your own work; you
will instinctively
respond to some of the sites you access. You will learn to apply some
aesthetic standards to
help you reach reliable judgements – technical skill alone is no
guarantee of quality. You
will use the opinions of others to help you to judge your site. In
addition, you must evaluate
the software tools which you used in its development.
Typical questions to which you must learn to give reasoned answers
include:
• what particular tools were most useful?
• which tools were difficult to use?
• what features caused problems?
• if you had a choice of software, what did you select and why?
Some judgements are a matter of taste (subjective) while others can be
more objective.

Objective criteria
You will learn to consider formally whether:
• your product meets your list of intentions
• you met your deadlines
• if a budget was set, you kept within it
• your work is technically accurate
• any client or sample user expressed approval.
Subjective criteria
Subjective criteria are more difficult to evaluate and you will have to
seek more than one
opinion to help you to arrive at judgements such as the following:
• does your website put across the right message?
• have you used the right images for your potential users?
• is your product aesthetically pleasing?

Grade A
To achieve an A grade, students must demonstrate that they can
effectively use a wide
variety of the more advanced software tools and produce a more complex
and user-friendly
site.
....
--
Geoff Berrow (put thecat out to email)
It's only Usenet, no one dies.
My opinions, not the committee's, mine.
Simple RFDs http://www.ckdog.co.uk/rfdmaker/

Geoff Berrow wrote:
Chuckle!

If this is taught properly - good! Re-use someone else's expertise, don't
waste your time re-inventing the wheel. I hope this includes how to exploit,
(without infringing intellectual property rights), all the stuff now available
on the web. (I spend a lot of time reverse-engineering things - within ethical
& legal limits, I hope).

Hm! The only way I've seen so far to produce decent quality pages is to
understand the basic element structure of a document tree. And the basic
attributes that can be applied to each of the limbs.

But I am not aware of strong imperatives to understand the detailed syntax of
HTML. All those pointy-brackets, arbitrary tag-names, etc. Those are for
tools, not people, to worry about. If people need to see those, it is because
tools have failed us. Mostly, they do fail us. (Even with Dreamweaver MX2004,
I still edit often the HTML code itself. I would hope not to have to do this
within 5 years).

I think something like that should also apply to CSS. But, unfortunately, I
haven't yet spotted the higher-level abstraction needed for this. The terrible
fact may be that CSS is not a good implementation of a well-formed
higher-level concept. We may be stuffed.

The aim of a web site is to communicate with the audience. Everything else is
a means to that end. Evaluation *must* include some sort of objective
judgement of the degree of communication. Otherwise, what is the point?

Is there a formal method (or "methodology") here? When in doubt, I use
OPENframework.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourc...rchitecture%22

Or DMR Macroscope
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourc...DMR+Macroscope

Chuckle! Complexity of product is a failure, not a success. Can the candidates
satisfy complex requirements in a user-friendly way with *simple* methods and
techniques? *That* is the indication of mastery!

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

On Sat, 29 May 2004 17:07:29 +0100, Geoff Berrow
<blthecat@ckdog.co.uk> wrote:

Is it overly cynical of me to think that to achieve an A grade by
those criteria it's necessary to use Flash and all the dancing
penguins you can muster ?
--
Smert' spamionam