Criticizing your design

Everyone just loves criticism. It's easy to do, and hard to accept. As a web page designer and creator, you will have to get very used to criticism from outside sources. People you have never met, who live in faraway places, will have no problem telling you exactly what they don't like about your pages. Sounds like fun, right? You can protect yourself somewhat by being critical of your own work, and letting people close to you do the same. Web pages evolve, they don't just pop up out of nowhere. Part of this evolution will come directly from the sometimes constructive, sometimes harsh, criticism of others.


More Teamwork

Before you roll out your pages, let other people see them first. A lot of pages go straight from the drawing board in one person's mind, to implementation. All without anyone but the creator seeing it first. This is a bad idea. Put your ego on the shelf for a minute, go down the hall and ask someone, "Hey, what do you think of this?" Make sure your teammates get a chance to see the development and offer suggestions while you are creating the page. Nothing is worse than spending twenty hours writing HTML, only to have everyone think what you have done is awful. Let people make suggestions while you are creating, it will make the whole process much easier. With the added benefit that your page will be better too. Nice, eh?

Have someone else read the text, too, and always run it through a spelling checker. It is sometimes a good idea to let someone else on the team do the spell check: it raises the odds that grammar mistakes will be corrected.

E-mail other people that you know have developed successful web pages. Send them the URL to your page in development and ask for their opinion; it couldn't hurt.


The Big Cheese

Make sure your boss sees the page before it goes live. I don't know how I could make this any more clear. If possible, hold a meeting and show the page to everyone important in the department. Remember you will be representing them all.

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Dick Piccard revised this file (http://www.ohiou.edu/pagemasters/class/html2/critic.html) on October 25, 2000.

Please E-mail any comments or suggestions to acatec@www.ohiou.edu.