Is Alabama Lacking Talented Web Designers?
- Posted at: 8:12 am
- Filed in: Design
Today I was browsing around the Xemion Web Designer Directory, only to find there were very few web design companies in Alabama that produce what I consider high quality work.
I came across several poorly coded, slow loading, image heavy websites. One in particular was just a huge 1013 x 1922 pixel image, with several map links. There was no actual copy at all on the page. This particular website also took a whopping 196.33 seconds to load on a 56k modem!
This lead me to wonder if there is just no real quality education in Alabama when it comes to web design, or are these people just smaller companies, with no design experience or education at all just starting out? I am not trying to criticize anyone’s work… especially since there may come a day I am applying to one of these design companies. I’m just simply curious.
There are exceptions listed on the site of course. Some of the companies produce wonderful work, but hopefully there are many larger design companies in Alabama that are just not listed on this particular site.
Who do you work for? Just curious.
Hey Jeremy,
I can give you that info privately if you are really curious.
I was browsing Xemion to see if Alabama based web design companies were making a move to standard based websites. kinetic seems to be the only one I am familiar with here in Birmingham producing standards based sites.
You would probably be a good person to ask about other design companies here in AL making the effort.
I have also been troubled by the level of web design education (or lack thereof) here in the Birmingham area. Then again, I think it is a problem that is found just about everywhere. You have schools like Herzing and Virginia Tech telling anyone that they can be a web designer, and teaching them tools like Dreamweaver without passing along any basic usability knowledge.
I’m sure there are more talented designers in Alabama, but I only list designers that choose to be listed on Xemion.com I’ve advertised Xemion on CSS Beauty, Stylegala and the CSS Vault to attract standards-based designers, but I haven’t had a great response. It’s like they’re too busy validating their sites to worry about marketing