Wdw Boston

Web design in the Cloud Lenkov

SiteKreator

Web Design Tools Evolution • NotePad • FrontPage • DreamWeaver • CMS • Cloud-based design tools • Telekinesis design tools

(coming soon)

(you wish)

Cloud What? • Cloud as SaaS • We need a change - where else to go • Everyone else is already there • When the industry matures, new paradigms (salseforce, Gmail, Google Docs, Photoshop Express)

are born

Cloud Advantages • Instant gratification • Collaboration • Access from everywhere • Integrated (design and content) • Incremental improvements, Revision control • Designers can create the design and delegate the content management to client

Challenges • Mixing design, content, interactivity • UI to create UI • Effective machine-generated code • All browsers are not created equal • Browsers still don’t have enough horse (how WYSIWYG you can go)

(oxymoron or maybe not)

power for heavy image editing (will have soon)

• No standards to define design

Elements of page design in a typical web site

• Layout • Visuals (images, flash) • Styles (content, menus, etc) • Interactive elements • Content placeholders (for CMS)

How to represent the layout? • Ordered List? • Grid? • Layers with abs position? • Nested rows and columns of cells?

How to represent Styles? • Apply CSS over many elements to define a single style

• Style is needed for: •

Content Styles

•

Menu Styles (button, caption)

•

CMS-specific elements

How to represent Interactive Elements • Style for the element • Effects - Behavior on different events (click, mouse-over, etc)

Cloud-based Design Architecture

Design Editors

Designer

CMS

Client

Effects Library

Developer