Web Design Inspiration Blog | SpicyWebDesigners.com

Michael Ott is a veteran web designer from Perth, Australia who decided to create a pretty interesting blog called “ThatWebGuyBlog.com”. He originally started the site because friends and colleagues had questions about design. He is a Senior Designer with a Perth-based firm and he has been designing sites for the past 11 years by his calculations.

Mike’s blog is full of useful information that is written to encourage exploration in web design and coding and to spread the word of best practices in web design. ThatWebGuyBlog.com is laid out in a simple and easy to digest manner which is perfect for people looking to learn a new technique and I am sure that you’ll enjoy reading his musings about web design in general.

What was your original idea when starting ThatWebGuyBlog.com?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’ve been running another blog for about 5 years now but it’s not really the right place for me to be posting articles about design (although I did occasionally sneak a few in).

Secondly I get enquiries from friends, colleagues and twitter followers about design – what tools or apps to use, how to accomplish a certain thing with CSS – and of course the obligatory “why doesn’t this work in IE!?” etc. A lot of these queries also come from designers new to the industry, and I often lend a hand to those who send me a tweet for help. I think, because I’ve been designing and coding for about 11 years now, that there is some (misguided?) notion to suggest I might know what I’m doing

So with this in mind it was time to start a new blog.

How long have you been running it for?

It’s very new – only launched in May 2009. I don’t advertise it anywhere and rely pretty much on word of mouth – or word of twitter mostly. I’ve been mentioned on a stack of CSS showcase web sites and that doesn’t hurt for publicity either.

I see that ThatWebGuyBlog.com is made up of people writing content.  How many contributors do you currently have?

There’s only me actually, but I’ve had a couple of requests from industry colleagues and friends if they can contribute. I’m entertaining the idea of opening it up to guest posts, but no concrete plans just yet.

How can web designers and the web design community benefit from your site?

That’s a tricky one to answer, because there are already several resources out there (ALA comes to mind) that kind of make ThatWebGuyBlog.com and a lot of other smaller blogs redundant. That said, I try to write my articles to be less intimidating and get to the point faster. At least the latter is what I’ve been told. My articles do however concentrate more on common web design best practices that seem to have been forgotten or never learned by beginners and industry professionals. I still know of seasoned designers for example, who know nothing about semantics, or don’t bother to get their sites to validate. This both amuses and annoys me.

What future plans do you have for the website?

I would be lying if I said I had a concrete goal in sight. It’s evolving as ideas come to me. As eluded earlier I am thinking about having guest posts from other designers who know more about me on a certain subject. PHP for example, is something I’m only average at best, so I’m hardly qualified to write an article that might require better than average PHP skills. I also plan to add more tutorials with a CSS/XHTML focus.

And like any good designer I plan to tweak the design whenever I get the urge. Your own blog is pretty much the only place a designer can go nuts without consequence.

What makes and keeps you so passionate about running this website Mike?

I’m far from being a design guru despite what it says on my coffee mug. I love being challenged and learning other ways of doing things – and more importantly learning why those alternative ways might be better. I think many designers (myself included) can sometimes get stuck into doing things a certain way. Having the blog forces me to think hard about what I’m writing  - because even though I might think I know everything on a certain topic, I have to ask myself “but is that method really the best way to do it?” – and I know anything I say is open to scrutiny and more importantly, discussion. There’s something to be said about committing your ideas to electronic paper and having them literally undergo a peer review process. It’s both liberating and scary.

Passion is one thing, time is another. I work full time as a Senior Designer and I can only give ThatWebGuyBlog.com attention between work and raising a family. A lot of my articles are fully or partially composed during the train ride to work and back (or when my daughters are asleep!).

Naturally web design is a topic that we find interesting but do you ever find that you run out of material to write about and where do you find the topics for the articles that you write?

Finding a topic to write about is always a challenge because let’s face it – most have been done already. But I keep an updated document of potential topics even though I usually end up scrapping some of those ideas.

Inspiration usually comes from an unexpected source – Twitter. I often help designers in the Twitterverse with CSS or other design related issues, or just offer encouragement when it looks like they’re going to give up and go back to tables. If I haven’t already written an article on the subject of their despair, I will. And then I’ll share it of course

Teresa Watts aka “Chisa” is a web designer from Perth, Western Australia in Australia. She currently runs her freelance web design portfolio, her blog “ChiGarden” and works full-time as a Web and Graphic Designer. She has been designing since she was 16 years old and has been loving design ever since.

1. How did you first get started designing web sites?

I first started like most people do – designing a personal site for themselves. After a couple of years of maintaining my own site I became more and more interested in the design aspect, finally deciding that was what I wanted to do for a living.

2. When did you design your first website?

I designed my first website when I was 16, a manually updated blog covered in my amateur illustrations. I thought it was fantastic at the time!

3. What are the biggest challenges that you face on the projects you work on?

I think the most difficult and important aspect of projects is communicating with the client. Sometimes clients don’t know exactly what they want, or what they want isn’t really the best for what they want to achieve in my professional opinion, so it’s very important to discuss their options and ideas before getting too into it. If there’s a failure in communication at the start of the process then unless you’re very lucky you end up paying for it down the track.

The other difficult part is actually finding the clients, but as I’ve just started freelancing I don’t have a huge amount of experience with that yet!

4. Where did you go to school? And, has it helped you become a better web designer?

I studied Computer Science at the University of Western Australia, and decided half way through that I didn’t enjoy programming and wanted to design. The programming experience made it easier for me to grasp web-related scripting languages, but most of the skills I use today are self-taught. I did end up working at the university as a designer for a while after graduating and gained some other useful opportunities and contacts along the way though, so I have no regrets.

5. How has your work on “ChiGarden”, your blog, helped you gain more exposure in the web design community?

I tend to be a bit lazy with content, but as I like to redesign my blog every year I receive some exposure and praise through the design work. Recently ChiGarden has been featured in various CSS galleries and articles on popular design blogs, which is quite exciting! One of the articles I posted on my blog, a tutorial for making an Internet Explorer voodoo doll, also got a lot of attention and over a year later still brings more people to my website than anything else.

6. Would you say that you are doing what you “love” or are “passionate” about?

Absolutely – I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise. I love that the web design process requires both creative and analytical skills, and there’s always something new to learn. I love that I can happily work on web design and development all day then come home and do some more work on personal projects. It seems rare, to find something that you both love doing and can make a decent living from, so I feel very lucky.

7. How do you usually price out your web design projects?

I usually have a chat with the client about what they’re after and what kind of direction they want their design to go in, and then estimate how long it will take me based on previous experiences. I then add in a safety margin and multiply it by my hourly rate, which I’ve figured out based on what other local freelancers seem to be charging and what I can live on. I’m still getting the hang of the best way to price things and estimating accurately, but tracking how long I spend on each project helps to make sure I’m charging what I should be.