Recently I went to afunction regarding website design and the topic of the function was doesTomorrows World need Designers?. Thefocus on the topic was that in the near future, with technology advancing theway it is, there will be a whole new world of designing, advertising andmarketing the world over.
You will be able to, with the help of modern tools, be able to create all this yourself you will not need a professional designer. A possibility was that Artificial Intellegence would be able to design all kinds of things themselves without the help of people. What a thought!
As the second option seems a bit far fetched for me, I concentrated on the option of an unprofessional person creating and designing his own professionally put together website. I went out into the world and tested how far in reality we are from this possibility.
Front Page 2003 Although very outdated, it is still being widely used for building websites. You can still download it with ease and use it in your every day application. In general, building a website with Front Page is a bit of a schlep. I had to create cells and edit them with Format Cells like in the olden days. I had all sorts of problems with it like the tables not staying where I placed them, having me go back and edit everything again. Some things I couldnt do were adding a background image to the header without having to manually decode it. In general it was a tedious, frustrating task which I never want to repeat again. Although tedious, there are definitely a few advantages to Front Page 2003.
Of course, there were some disadvantages as well like:
- The software is very much outdated
- They still make use of tables
- Not very user friendly to new users
So, does tomorrow's world need designers? After looking at a few other programs that we are making use of today such as Dreamweaver, Expression Web and Visual Site Designer, it made me realize that we REALLY need new, updated software for website designing. Frontpage 2003 is user friendly but very outdated where Dreamweaver CS3 is a good application, but only people that know all the jargon of website design. Expression Web and Visual Site Designer are a bit better as far as technology is concerned. All of the above though, with the exception of Front Page 2003 needs a professional to be able to apply the design properly. If a normal person would need to use these, they would have to do research on the program first which would be very time consuming to say the least. The Visual Site Designer made it the most easy though, where you could basically just draw up the page. Expression Web and Visual Site Designer are both very good tools although it cannot replace the work of a professional site designer. We could definitely, in the near future, start looking at a perfect system (A.I) to do our website design for us.