When is the Client Not Always Right?

When is the client not always right? If you are a web or graphic designer, you know what I am talking about. Here's a recent example. I designed a site for a client that I really liked. They liked it too. This is not always the case. How many times have you designed a stunning site and the client doesn't like it. Ugh...that hurts. Anyway, things were going smoothly until... (insert music of dread here)

I made a CSS navigation bar, purely text based. The design was already image heavy and I was concerned about load time. I am also on a Javascript diet so I was going for absolutely no Javascript. Therefore, I was trying to avoid image-based navigation with image swapping. Yes, I know you can do this with CSS and very little Javascript. Regardless, I like the flexibility and speed of CSS text-based navigation and that's what I wanted. The client came back to me and wanted button looking navigation and the buttons needed to be ovals. Well, that opens a whole can of worms.

The navigation bar was curved and the background image not consistent. It floated over other background images using absolute positioning. So, (hang with me here) if I used oval shaped buttons, I would need to save them as PNG's to take advantage of the alpha properties. That way, the background image would show up behind the rounded edges. I was also using a dropshadow so I really needed to use a PNG to make it look right. Of course older browsers will not display the alpha quality of a PNG properly...I'll get back to that. Slicing the buttons using Fireworks or Photoshop was not what I wanted. Since the background was different everywhere, I would have to place the buttons exactly correct for the sliced button image and the background to match up. I wanted more flexibility and did not want to use Javascript and a separate image file for each button.

Solution: I made an oval shaped background image and saved it as a .gif to have transparency around the oval. I saved it again as a PNG but added drop shadow. It looked way nicer than the GIF. The images were loaded using typical CSS. The background image for the navigation li tags included the customary old browser hack. That way, a newer browser would load the PNG's and look nice. Older IE browsers would load the GIF's...not as pretty but functional. Here's an example (I am leaving out height, width, etc.)

li.nav {
background-image: button.gif;
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family:inherit;
background-image: button.png;
}


Bottom line...I should have told the client the oval buttons posed problems and would result in more code, and possibly slower load times. Not to mention, in an already graphics heavy design, I though the buttons were too much and too old school looking. The question is, when can we tell clients "No"?

About the Author

Mark Brumley is the owner of Web Design of Austin, A small website design company in Austin, TX.

Source: Web Design Articles on ArticlesTree.com





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