Designers Need To Get A Clue

[bonusgeek]

Why does every designer I deal with style menu headings using h1-h4 tags? What makes them think having 7 h1 tags on a page is a good thing? I understand not many designers are proficient in seo, but man it's frustrating.

What's crazy is it seems to be the standard and I don't know why. I even bought the suckerfish dw extension and that stupid thing uses h1 tags for menu headings also. It's like one designer came up with a way to piss off developing webmasters and the whole design industry followed suit.

End of rant...

[Guard Dog]

I used to get that all the time as well. Lately I have been developing my own graphics and then telling my XHTML coder which pieces are Header tags, which are LI, and so forth. Saves that hassle, but is work up front to get there.

[bonusgeek]

Yea I am getting somewhat familiar with fireworks myself so I can do a fair job with graphics. Nothing spectacular but enough to make an image look presentable.

Of course places like istock don't offer images on a transparent background so that's a pain too.

I just need to get over the hump with designing from scratch so I don't need to rely on anyone. To me designing and playing around with graphics is one of the fun parts about being a webmaster anyways - it helps me take a little break from the daily grind to be creative.

[Guard Dog]

I use iStockPhoto quite a bit and always have transparent images. Kinda Typically I import the file into Fireworks, then delete the background, then select whichever image I am looking to use, then copy and paste it into my 'template' image.

Not sure if that helps, but it has always worked for me.

I like the graphical thing too Takes a lot of time, though.

[bonusgeek]

Man I feel pretty stupid. In the past the illustration files always made fireworks freeze on me so I didn't think I could use them at all in fireworks. So I just wrote eps files off all together. But I recently upgraded to the newest version of fireworks and just now tested out a new istock eps image and it seemed to open up fine.

So this whole time I have been using the jpg's, then the magic wand tool to get rid of the background - then the outer glow to clean up the rough edges. They never turned out as crispy as I wanted but I thought that was the only workaround.

Thanks man, this helps me a lot.