What is a work flow? What’s your ideal personal work flow?

A Work Flow for web development is the process in which you design and create the website. There are a few steps involved in the process, and it differs a bit based on if you are starting from scratch or if you are redesigning something that already exists. Organization is the key, and it can get overwhelming if you’re presented with a ton of unorganized information that you need to make sense of. My ideal personal workflow is:

  1. Define client needs and audience.
  2. Research what competitors are doing, what’s working, what’s not, and draw inspiration.
  3. Organize the information and figure out the sitemap.
  4. Research fonts and color schemes, make type and color studies to see what will fit the mood of the website and match the client’s branding, what will appeal to the target audience?
  5. This is the part where you’re supposed to do wireframes, but I actually really just like to start comping right away with actual information/data that will be on the website, so I can visualize what it will look like and how everything will look altogether, colors, fonts, images. Create a few mood boards, determine which one will fit best, then from there start determining the layout. I can gain a good idea of what the layout should be from doing that, then do wireframes if needed.
  6. Get approval and start coding. It’s probably a good idea to get your HTML organized first, then start styling in CSS.

 

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Why it Might Be a Good Idea to Always Use a Type Kit Instead of External Linking

I was searching to see if Lato font uses ligatures and I stumbled upon this troubleshooting page from a month ago, where suddenly Lato font had been updated on Google Fonts and people’s webpages were looking off due to the x-height change. They ended up reverting it, but the lesson is that they can change the appearance of fonts at any random time without notice, which could result in broken, ugly pages and alignment being off.

 

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Web Design vs Front End Development: What’s the difference?

From what I have read, the job duties can be similar or vary drastically from one employer to another. Personally, I would say that a web designer is the person who comes up with the visual presentation and organization, overall aesthetic and layout of the website. Depending on the client, they might come up with the entire branding for the company, or they may have to use the branding that is already in place, and figure out how to best integrate that identity with the information that the audience will be looking for on the site. Graphic Design itself seems like it blurs into the marketing field, but that’s a different topic. Anyway, a front-end developer would be more code-oriented, they would be more into computer science and would probably have advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Web Designers also typically know basic HTML and CSS, and have an understanding of what is possible to achieve with Javascript. Likewise, some front-end developers could also design the user interface of a website.

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