BlueDreamer

Exactly! Yes! You have to know what content you're dealing with before you can think about design. My statement may have looked stupid but I just wanted to see what reaction I got - throwing in a seemlessly stupid/pointless/irrelevant question is an old trick (often used by trainers, coaches etc) because it really brings out peoples ideas, thoughts and convictions - it tends to make you think "hey that's not right, THIS is the the way to do it", and can open up some really good debate.

That's interesting about use of images, though I'd expect that to be the case because of displaying corporate branding and all the other related stuff. You should still be able to say (in words) "I worked on www.bigcompany.com and was responsible for creating the site graphics" without fear of a knock on the door.

The mind boggles... That gives me an idea - a competition to create a design a template that totally doesn't suit the content

If you were presenting the information on the others sites as part of your CV I can't see the harm in doing it. After all a CV is supposed to demonstrate your qualifications, skills, past work and achievements.

Thank you Expat629!

Manually updating like that is going to be a bit kak-handed for them. Contribute will allow them to make changes but unless you weed out some of the formatting options you always run the rsik of someone filling pages with oversized Comic sans and blinking gifs - eeek! I think you'd be better off running the listings off of a database/CMS so they can make changes online in real time. You could run the site on a pre made jobs/recruitment script, there are many listed at Hotscripts (some of them are not bad, some are crap though!), and this would give them most of the features their site would probably need like categorisation, registration, posting user CV's etc. I'd also suggest looking at www.expressionengine.com to base the site on. EE is a very flexible CMS that you "mould" to work the way you want it to, and certainly for adding data like jobs it's quite a breeze. It also runs on standards compliant xhtml/css templates which will make your life a lot easier with the actual design/layout.

My vote goes for content every time. If you don't know what type of content you are dealing with how can you decide on the design approach? Let's say you open up your image editor (I'm not generic and just say "Photoshop"!) and create a beautiful pink and flowery design template - that's great, but when you learn the content is for the local hairy bikers club it ain't going to go down well

Having rediscovered EE recently I can say it's an awsome CMS, and the free Core version is a great choice for personal sites. I'm just waiting for the right customer to come along so I can use it with a vengence!

As a rule of thumb I always open all links in the same tab/window, mainly from the accessibility perspective. Users can open any link (apart from a JS link) in a ne wwindow if they want to so let the user decide.

Greetings! First post here, I've just seen the post over at Sitepoint and a UK forums sounded good. I've been building/developing sites since 1999, and working freelance for the last 4-5 years, so should have a few things to say! I'm currently heavily into the whole accessibility/usability thing with all new sites I build which can only be a good thing