[Zope] How do people work with html-designers?

[Doyon, Jean-Francois]

We use the design first approach, which has worked extremely well with
us.

We have an extensive UI development process for the web, which is itself
iterative, includes user feedback and testing and so on.  Experience has
show us on many occasions that developpers/programmers should NOT design
ANYTHING (graphical)! ;)

The only thing the designer needs to understand is the concepts (like
iterations within templates and so on).  He need not know any code, just
what is possible with automation.  When in doubt consult with the
developper(s).

Otherwise, the user is (mostly) king, and giving them the UI's they
want, can use, and makes them achieve their goals, is the primary
concern.  Google "User Centered Design"!

J.F.

-----Original Message-----
From: zope-bounces at zope.org [mailto:zope-bounces at zope.org] On Behalf Of
Chris Withers
Sent: March 16, 2007 04:51
To: Gaute Amundsen
Cc: zope at zope.org
Subject: Re: [Zope] How do people work with html-designers?

Gaute Amundsen wrote:
> How do people set up the zope development process and servers to work 
> well with web-designers who use wysiwyg editors like dreamweaver?

I use Twiddler for templating in these kind of situations:

http://www.simplistix.co.uk/software/python/twiddler

...as it provides a complete seperation of what the designers work with
and what the programmers work with. Provided what the designers save is
XHTML and they preserve the ids that the programmer is expecting,
there's no problem at all :-)

> After all one of the advertised advantages of ZPT, is that you can 
> send the template back to the designer without him destroying the TAL 
> code. (not right away at least)

That, for ZPT, was sadly a myth.

> In practice I find that once the original html has been split into 
> "main tempate" and "content template" parts, or the like, it gets 
> rather impractical to involve the designer again, and we end up having

> the coders do way more css work than they should.

Ultimately, that depends on how you do the split. It's certainly
possible to have the template and content template be realy html
documents that designers can work with...

> I know you can leave the "dummy content" in place, but often the 
> stylesheets, and scripts live in a different folder, and gets aquired 
> by zope for publishing.

Again, if you're careful, you can let your designers work on these files
consistently...

> If I could get this whole process to be more of a two way thing, I 
> could do do stuff, like start a site with a prototype, and have the 
> designer beautyfy that, and work iteratively, instead of allways 
> starting with the graphic design...

Yup, this is how I enjoy working ;-)

cheers,

Chris

--
Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting
            - http://www.simplistix.co.uk


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