Web development skills audit

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hame22
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Web development skills audit

Post by hame22 »

Hello all,

I have recently started a new job as head of web development at a communications agency. This agency is rapidly moving to the web from traditional forms of media such as magazines. This means that athough we have a small team with excellent web skills we also have a team of designers with little exposure to the web.

I have been asked to conduct a web skills audit throughout the company to assess what skills and experience are hidden away (ideally they want to keep existing staff members)

I was wondering whether anyone had any experience of running such an audit/assessment - how they did it and any lesson/tips they learnt?

My plan is to setup a questionnaire and speak to each staff member indiviudally, firstly assessing any skills and skill levels e.g. rate yourself between 1-5 in HTML/CSS/Photoshop/flash etc... and then identifying areas where they are keen to learn in

But I would welcome any experiences and opinions that you may have

Thanks in advance
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Benjamin
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by Benjamin »

I would look at their previous work and discuss it with them. I would also ask them if they feel they have skills that aren't being utilized.

Fair warning though, these guys may be pretty tight knit. If they see you as a new guy cleaning house, they may not like you very much. Even the guys who do make the cut may leave, especially if their buddies go out and find other opportunities.

I've seen companies replace their entire staff before thinking it was a great idea, but it took over a year for production to creep back up to where it was in the first place.

So good luck :)
MiniMonty
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by MiniMonty »

First I'd echo what's just been said about being careful around creative egos - but the truth is that if you have good designers who are used to print (magazines) they should make the move to web VERY easily. I made the move in very similar circumstances to those you describe and had no trouble. Print is much more demanding technically and there is far more to go wrong so you'll probably find your designers enjoy going to web as it's just so much simpler. If they are any good they'll understand the space and the principles in five seconds and they are all(of course) web users anyway.

My one piece of advice would be find the techiest designer (the one who has already played with Dreamweaver) and send him/her on a decent Flash course because (in my experience) it's very handy to have at least one designer who can write a bit of code and understand what the geeks are talking about at lunchtime !

Best wishes
Monty
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Eran
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by Eran »

if you have good designers who are used to print (magazines) they should make the move to web VERY easily ... Print is much more demanding technically and there is far more to go wrong so you'll probably find your designers enjoy going to web as it's just so much simpler
I couldn't disagree more with those statements. Assuming that web design is the same only easier than web design is a major mistake. Web design is much more complicated than print design, because you have the entire layer of interaction - meaning you have usability and user-experience to consider. Those facets are much more important to a website than if it looks good, which is somewhat subjective and most people don't even pay attention to it.

Interaction and UI design require a set of skills that is practically non-existent in print-design. (Good) Print designers can often make sites that look pretty but aren't necessarily usable. I can't comment on your own work since I haven't seen it, but if you have been designing websites as if they are printed media with less constraints, chances are high you made some grievous usability offenses.
MiniMonty
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by MiniMonty »

pytrin wrote:
if you have good designers who are used to print (magazines) they should make the move to web VERY easily ... Print is much more demanding technically and there is far more to go wrong so you'll probably find your designers enjoy going to web as it's just so much simpler
I couldn't disagree more with those statements. Assuming that web design is the same only easier than web design is a major mistake. Web design is much more complicated than print design, because you have the entire layer of interaction - meaning you have usability and user-experience to consider. Those facets are much more important to a website than if it looks good, which is somewhat subjective and most people don't even pay attention to it.

Interaction and UI design require a set of skills that is practically non-existent in print-design. (Good) Print designers can often make sites that look pretty but aren't necessarily usable. I can't comment on your own work since I haven't seen it, but if you have been designing websites as if they are printed media with less constraints, chances are high you made some grievous usability offenses.
I'm not suggesting that design for the web is "the same only easier" and I'll agree with some of what you say about interaction but you should understand that what I refer to when I say that web design is simpler is the availability of WYSIWYG design tools, the ability to test and develop with essentially no cost and no risk, a colour palette which (compared to print) is minuscule but completely consistent, display media (screens) that will accept and display almost any image type at almost any resolution, virtually instant "fixing" of any design / colour / usability error, an immense and ever growing stock library of assets, the whole environment being end-to-end RGB, tiny file sizes for almost everything - I could go on... (and on).

Print design is not a question of "make it look OK in Word and press PRINT". Print design is about colour management that no web designer will (thankfully) ever have to even think about. It's about 300dpi images (600 for B/W) that have to display perfectly when printed onto 48 sheet posters in Piccadilly and Times Sq having been printed six thousand miles apart. It's about understanding all the international paper coatings that your job might end up on, compensating within the document to ensure that an ad in a magazine in Japan looks the same in a magazine in Europe. It's about producing work to a budget AND within a budget (time spent on the job AND cost to print the final product), understanding fifth colour usage (metals), bleed on full page images and DP spreads - in short - it's a very technical discipline that takes a long time to learn even if you have no eye for design and only produce ugly work. As a print designer I went over to web easily and happily and that the skills I already had were very useful. (of course I've had to learn new things and new habits) but to take a web-only designer into print would require about a year of full time on the job training. Get a web site wrong and you can fix it there and then for free and (usually) in minutes. Get a print job wrong and you've cost the client tens of thousands and it can never be recalled, fixed or amended. Once the ink is dry, it's dry... Next time you look at a glossy magazine or brochure try to really look at it and think how you would go about producing it. Start with the idea that page 1 is not printed (or layed out by the designer) next to page 2.

Also, I'm not here to start a debate about which is more difficult, more technical or more "worthy". But the fact that print (newspapers, magazines etc) is dying should tell us a lot. Part of the appeal of the web (see original posters' question) is that it's cheap, quick and easy to produce. No bad thing in anyone's book. (oops - I mean eBook).

Best wishes
Monty
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Eran
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by Eran »

WYSIWYG design tools
I hope you're not referring to tools like Dreamweaver's Design view or Frontpage, cause those produce malformed, non standards compliant markup. Regardless, they are not "design-tools", they are markup generating tools. Design is the process of creating the layout visually, not implementing it in markup languages (that would be - web development).
Print design is not a question of "make it look OK in Word and press PRINT"
I never said that. I just said that Print design skills don't necessarily translate well to web design, and web design is much more concerned with usability and interaction design that is not a concern in print design at all (since it's non-interactive). I was not comparing difficulty levels, I was comparing skill-sets. This does not mean I said it's impossible to make the switch, what I meant (and I think it's pretty clear from what I wrote), is that it's wrong to treat web-design as print design with less constraints. They are different vocations with some overlap and a lot of different requirements.
Part of the appeal of the web (see original posters' question) is that it's cheap, quick and easy to produce
It's easy to produce not because design is cheap. Design costs are roughly the same. It's easy to produce because you don't need giant machines to print content, and sometimes you don't need an editorial department to produce it - since you can rely on user generated content in many cases to a very large degree. You can create digital versions of printed material as PDFs and similar formats with less cost, and do fine with just print design skills. Those however, are not websites.
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Benjamin
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by Benjamin »

:offtopic: Let's not get too far off topic guys :)
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Eran
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by Eran »

I think it's very relevant for the OP to understand the differences between web design and print design if he's going to conduct such an audit.
MiniMonty
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by MiniMonty »

pytrin wrote:I think it's very relevant for the OP to understand the differences between web design and print design if he's going to conduct such an audit.
I agree and actually you and I are sort of saying the same thing (albeit yelling from different trees across the same river) :wink:

Let's get back to the OP...

I went from print to web design. I found it interesting and not too difficult. I had an interest already (as I am sure most of your designers will).
Designers are (generally speaking) inquisitive souls who like to make things which work well and look good. No one got a design degree without having to
design a socket, a brochure, a chair and a packaging concept. The essential principles of good design work across all disciplines and I'll bet that you'll find your designers
1) want to keep their jobs 2) want to produce great websites / eMedia 3) know quite a lot about it already 4) saw you coming and are prepared in a positive way.
All the guys who know Quark will get the concept of a CSS because print designers have been using it (under a different name) for centuries.

OK, they'll all know photoshop, Quark and illustrator backwards, but if they haven't been exploring flash, dreamweaver, a 3D app of some sort and wondering about the back end
then they're not worth their salt as designers in 2010. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with your audit - but I'd still send at least one of them on a decent course because
once you employ a few back end gurus you'll need someone (maybe you) to speak php and colour theory, sql and user experience to both teams at least semi-fluently :D

The whole reason I'm even here to post on this forum is because I decided that I (as a front end designer) needed a better understanding of the back end developers world, role,
constraints, capabilities etc., I've learned some php and I'll carry on reading and making mistakes but the real value for me has been to develop a much better understanding of the
time and effort it takes to "make things work" when I throw lunatic functionality concepts at my back end team and expect magic in minutes.

And BTW - if you think print isn't interactive just ask yourself why the inside back cover advertising is the most expensive in the whole book ?
People pick up magazines, put their left thumb on the facing edge and flick through it - backwards.
Every time.
C'mon smile - you do it too...
And you think we don't know ?

Best wishes
Monty
alex.barylski
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Re: Web development skills audit

Post by alex.barylski »

I couldn't disagree more with those statements
+1
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