Spicy Web Designer Interview with Cedric Dugas

Cedric Dugas is a front-end web developer from Montreal, Canada. He runs a blog called “Position Absolute” and his business site which showcases the work that he does as a front-end developer. Cedric has launched more than 50 sites and has over 4 years experience. He has been designing since the 7^th grade and has learned a great deal since the design of his first website.

1. How does a “Front-end Developer” differ from a “Web Designer” in your words?

Well our primary goal is to take the designer’s template and transform it in HTML.
It is really important to make the HTML template as true as possible to the designer work.

2. How did you first start designing and developing websites?

I first started doing websites in 7th grade for my Diablo 1 guild lol. It was in frames and I remember having a GIF of 300ko that was taking forever to download hehe.

After I did my school big band website, this time in tables. I pretty much did websites all my life, never thought I would be doing that for a living. Life is weird sometimes.

3. What are 3 of your favorite tools that help you do Front-End Development?

1. Firebug, a Firefox extension for debugging JavaScript and CSS, saves my life every day.
2. Multiple IE, to check IE6 and IE7 at the same time
3. E-text-editor, every web developer has his text editor, but this one creates HTML tags on the fly. It really makes me more productive

4. Where do you gather your inspiration from when you begin working on a new project?

I’m looking at other works, and try to gather the best of them. My favorite design source is mostinspired.com and for programmation stuff, ajaxian.

Every web worker need to stay on top of things. It is really important for me to know what is going on and where the web is heading. If you just do your 40 hours a week you will wake up in 5 years and you will be useless.

5. Do you usually work with a Web Designer who hands you the design so that you can develop it?  How does that work?

It’s pretty simple. The designer does mostly everything he wants and I get the headache of recreating it in HTML and CSS

some would say front-enders do the dirty work

6. How do you usually price your projects?

I have a fixed hourly rate of 35$. I rarely quote on projects.

7. What is the biggest problem you face as a front-end web developer?

Creating every details designer usually do, like shadows and opacity is certainly the hard part
Internet explorer 6 will always be my biggest pain in the ass. As a designer, if you don’t do CSS, you can’t imagine how IE6 makes our life miserable.