Websites

[Spearball]

All i want to know is what really defines a professional website? I hear that websites are more profession than other. What really do they mean. Even though the non professional sometimes look even better to me....

[Budfred]

That isn't a simple question... Some might say it is a website designed and maintained by someone who is paid to do so versus someone who is maintaining a site as a volunteer or their own site versus a site that is simply a prefabricated site made by some bigger company like Amazon...

However, there is also the quality of the site... The site for my work is maintained by professionals, but it is a mess... I have a friend who designs and maintains sites that are easy to navigate and graphically elegant... She is distressed by visiting an overly busy and confusing site like the one at my work...

There are some sites owned and maintained by amateurs which are quite well done and easy to use... There are others created by amateurs or professionals that are garish and confusing... I was looking at cars this evening and was startled by a loud blast of music on the Honda site... Most of the car sites are overly busy and attempt to startle customers rather than simply providing helpful information... I wanted to know what exterior colors some models have and it took several clicks to find out in most cases...

So the answer is probably whatever you would like...

[Paul Komski]

What defines a professional advertisment or painting or book or film or theatre performance?

Websites differ quite enormously and the way they look is less than half of the whole. Some are static (never change and no user interaction) and some are dynamic. Dynamic pages (such as on these forums) react to user input, requests, posts by using a mixture of php code on the server and javascripts as run on the users' own machines.

The point is, that the architecture of dynamic sites is crucially important to their success - functionally. Other aspects such as having secure pages, private pages, FTP downloads and so on may also need to be addressed.

There has been an enormous growth in blogging and other content managment systems, when once the pages are up and running they can be changed by users simply editing and adding stuff on line and without having to do any "design" at all. Some such are amateurish and others very professional just as with any websites you happen on. Whether of not the designers got paid or not is probably not the issue, though that is generally the difference between "amateurs" and "professionals"; amateur is a term that can also be used as a synonym for an enthusiast.