Me and a friend are looking to team up for some freelance web designing. We both
ID: 651025 • Letter: M
Question
Me and a friend are looking to team up for some freelance web designing. We both are very strong PHP coders and website designers, but I am better at design and he is better at PHP. So, I'll be controlling the stuff the user sees, he'll be controlling the stuff the user does.
In order to speed up development, I'm wondering if anyone has experience or recommendations for asynchronous web designing and coding. So far my best idea is to create a doctrine of which tags and classes every element should be wrapped in (if any), then have us developing via FTP. He would create the code that spits out snippets of HTML, and I would simply style those snippets and wrap it in the page. Does anyone know of a better way?
So, any ideas?
Explanation / Answer
I tell you this out of sheer experience: get a @#$! graphic designer. Your clients will be able to tell the difference from developer designs (even if they are paid templates) and graphic designers' designs. If possible, get a web designer.
If you are the one with the best design feel, take the role of creative director and filter the graphic designer's input as you implement it. You can then focus on other related things such as UX.
If you want to do things right, you might also want to seek a copywriter or at least train yourself and/or your friend in copywriting, books 1-4 of Copyhackers are a great start. Believe me, content matters.
Functionality (sadly) won't matter to your clients as much as design and content. Once you nail design and content you can focus on functionality.
In my experience, these two factors will define your success.
Oh, yeah, and regarding your actual question, you might want to try Mercurial instead of using an FTP. And you might want to look into Joomla and Drupal as platforms (CMSs)for your web sites, so you can focus on developing what matters and not reinventing the wheel.
P.S.: I like Joomla better because of Gantry