Real World Freelance (Front-end Development)
One of the biggest lessons that anyone studying to become or just beginning to work as a freelance front-end developer is the fact that no matter what your standards and passion are for the web, you can’t always expect that your product (the website) will launch the same way that you finished your part of the development, or will you always be able to produce the product with your standards and/or best practices. I think this could go with many aspects of the web development process and feel free to include any other experiences you guys have had in comments.
During my time as a student at the Internet Professional Program at Washtenaw Community College I had the chance to have some great teachers get me the start towards the right way to think as a web standards perfectionist developer. In our code everything had to be perfectly streamlined, totally accessible, and render the same in every browser. This turned me into a perfectionist in the real world environment and what has set me on my way to a successful career. It even seems to annoy my associates and my girlfriend because I wont finish something until I find that one pixel that is messing up in Opera or some other browser.
For the last three years I have been working as a freelance/contract front-end web developer. I mostly do jobs for local web firms that are swamped with work and need someone that they can count on to knock out a couple templates from the designers Photoshop files. In turn they will implement all the content integration. I have been lucky to get in good with these companies and don’t have the hassle of dealing with trying to find clients themselves. They choose me because they know I am a perfectionist and have a passion to create my templates using the most up to date web standards and semantic code. Well I’m not sure if the people of the firm outside of the web department know this, they just know that I produce quality work in a timely fashion.
About 80% of the time things don’t really work out the way that you would like, with the templates that you created. I’m not saying its web firms that contract you out. Many of the firms I deal with have people in the web departments with the same passion and knowledge as I do, if not more. It’s also not your fault, its just the way the business goes. A lot of times the budgets and deadlines are tight and of course you would like to always produce templates or websites that have the features of a great portfolio piece, but the companies are on such a deadline they just need your templates so they can quickly implement the content and get it live. By doing this they probably miss some of the comments in your files, explaining why you did things a certain way or to utilize certain techniques and styles on the remaining pages. You would love to include all of the functionality and techniques that make a fully accessible and web standards compliant site, but the company contracting you out aren’t going to pay you for the extra time it may take unless the site requires it inside of the scope of work.
Being able to include all the techniques that make a great web standards site isn’t my biggest concern. I usually can produce a pretty decent site or templates in the deadline I am given and even spend extra hours then what I invoice for because I am a perfectionist and want the site to be something that I can show people. The biggest disappointment is when you hand over your work and the finished product comes out totally different. A lot of this will happened when an engineering team gets a hold of your templates and start plugging it in to the back-end. A lot of times these engineers don’t really know much about web standards and clean coding and just care solely on the functionality of specific features of the site and not the aesthetics or quality of code that creates it.
I recently had one of my most exciting templates I got to create get torn apart from another contracted out engineering team. I spent about three weeks of my life after working an 8 hour day, working 2-4 hours a night on a site where I had to create about 9 templates. The design was really great and was pretty complex to pull off with a totally 100% CSS layout. After I got done with the templates of course the client had a lot of changes that were of course changes to the design and nothing to do with the code. This should have been done in the design process but of course like always the client is going to have lots of changes, once they see the site on the web. After about a week of changes from the client, they had me tear it apart into a bunch of SSL’s, which took another night or two. This was a long month for me as I was also working on the Ann Taylor redesign(not launched) all day at another firm that I was contracted to work at.
I couldn’t wait to see how this site was turning out from the back-end side and kept in contact with people from the firm (they weren’t the ones doing the back-end). They gave me the IP to the development site and I checked it out and I saw that the layout was all jacked up and certain design features that I spent hours trying to replicate were gone. I looked at the code and saw they had totally just turned this site into a table based layout and a crappy nested bloated one at that. I was totally devastated. This was probably the worst case scenario that could have happened. It makes you feel like that whole month was wasted and the company that contracted you out wasted their money (they were highly devastated also). I know I got paid but like the rest of you, I’m sure this is your passion and more then just the money.
That was the best example I have but there are others such as the web teams redoing your navigation menu, (which you spent hours to do) because of the way they pull in the content dynamically or they use tables to pull things off, which could of been CSS because their under a tight time line to integrate the content, or even some type of CMS that breaks your templates down and adds tons of code bloat and weird tags. Sometimes I think that maybe it’s something I did or my code isn’t that good and wasn’t rendering properly for them. I get past that and realize that my code is good, I’m just too hard on myself and this is just how it is in the business. In a perfect world everything would look the same as you leave it but it’s not.
One area of work where you might not be able to follow the standards you believe and practice would be when you work for a large firm and they have a set way and standard that they produce sites. I found this out working as a contract web developer at one of the largest firms in my area. They have their standards and have proven applications and don’t want to jump to fully web standards sites since they have been developing their way and it has worked for so long. I would also say that their main focus is on the functionality of the application and the engineers developing the product and not the front-end. The sites I worked on are of course going to be my most notable sites but also my least web standards and sloppy coded sites. You have to take it for what it is, at one end I had to work inside of table based layouts and use inline styles but I learned a lot more about what it is to work inside of large scale E-Commerce applications and how to work with a team of engineers, architects, graphic designers and project managers.
If I had got hired on maybe I could have helped them see the light, and showed them how important it is to bridge the gap between a quality web standards front-end application and a back-end that supports this, which many of the employees already did but if one person in team believes in certain standards they can’t force it upon the others unless the company demand that as their standard of work. You can only try and make the higher ups see the benefits and hope they try and make a change.
In conclusion, you can’t expect that every piece of work you do is going to be held to your standards or the standards of the people you want to represent yourself to. This is unless you code the whole site yourself, or if is your company and you make sure the client knows the scope of work and budget that it takes to provide what is necessary to hand them over the highest quality site. if your a perfectionist like me you are most likely going to end up with a product, which you have some regrets or disappointments with the outcome. Until everyone on all sides from the client to the presidents of the web firms realize that the future of the web counts on us to follow web standards this is just something we are going to have to settle with, and try our best to make others realize there is a need to change.
November 27th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
[…] This is exactly what I was discussing in my previous article Real World Freelance (Front-end Development). In an ideal world we would be able to meet our standards but in the real world with budgets, timelines, and what is in the scope of work between those two, your going to have to settle with what you feel is best for the site and its users. If the client says there is not budget or everything that you sell them on, they say go ahead, more power to you but this is very rare at least from my side of the table. Perfection is not when there’s nothing to add, but when there’s nothing to take away When producing markup for a standards-friendly site, it’s all too easy to stick to the table-based way of doing things and create an over-abundance of container elements. While at first it may seem like common sense to force the markup into the design, doing so misses the point of standards-friendly production. […]