The beauty of a clean plate

February 23, 2005 · Comments

I love this stage of work.

After a few hours working solely in Macromedia Fireworks, the layout of the client’s new site has been approved. Up until now, the client has been looking at PNG files and has been warned, “don’t try clicking on anything, it’s just an image.” The text files containing the site architecture have been roughed together and now it’s time to start turning that single image concept into something the client can click on.

It’s a blank slate. Near empty directory and blank files. This is the part of the project that I love doing carefully and slowly, thinking about every line of code and how it will fit in the “big picture” later. I rarely use templates and I always turn off “design” view in Dreamweaver at this stage of the game. I prefer to start with a blank document every time, roughing in the XHTML structure of the page. CSS (style sheets) come afterwards, and while I know I may need to add to the XHTML to accommodate the style sheets, working this way forces me to separate presentation from content and really think before I add code that’s purely presentational. Right now, I am only thinking of content and structure, even if I don’t know the exact words the content will say. After I have a clean, accessible XHTML document that contains all the elements that are required for the page in the site I’ll open a new file that begins to describe the presentation.

I could do this stage in a text editor, but Dreamweaver does help auto-complete basic HTML and I don’t mind that. I might pull up sections of code from other pages, such as the meta tags or a particular navigation technique, but every site has its own quirks and no assumptions should be made now. Two sites could appear identical, but starting from scratch lets me learn from previous mistakes and from what other web designers are doing. There is nothing but possibility now.

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