AmityWeb

Hello from Caerphilly

Marketing oneself as a web designer is ok, it's what I do yet I am a developer (build websites and not design them), because its what people traditionally think of people who build websites. But i dont think one should expect a graphic designer (which is what most web designers are) to learn HTML/CSS or if they did then they would hardly be experts in the field and woukd only use it to aid design/understand the build, and not be expected to build the finished article. I similarly wouldn't expect web developers to have degrees in graphic design etc.
 
As for web designers handing over the design to web developers to code... Maybe not one man band / freelancers. But all the larger web agencies do. When we started using a designer it was one if the best things to happen to my company. The designer had far more skills than us developers so our websites looked so much better than when we tried to build them. If our graphic designer built the sites then the coding would be awful and they wouldn't know how to do half of it (like build in a CMS or some bespoke functionality).
 
In my opinion the best sites will be designed by a designer and built by a developer.

Images would be cached in browsers by default after the first load. The cache would expire shortly though, so you could try setting a high expirey time for images in the htaccess file (if its Apache, I dont know anything about IIS or Nginx or others).

This wont speed up initial download though, only keep the images for subsequent future visits.

So I would try optimising images further… make sure their file sizes are the lowest you can manage without affecting visible quality. You can try online services like Yahoo's Smush IT or TinyPNG.

Use Google Page Speed to highlight problematic areas. It will tell you if your images are optimised and offer you to download optimised versions you can then use.

Also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare. These sites exist to serve your images (and other asets like CSS/JS) faster and more locally to the requesting user. Cloudflare have free accounts.

And of course, a faster server if its still slow. Too many cheap providers these days.

I dont know for sure but my guess is nothing will "happen". You should have the standard one in your CSS, so ones all browsers use that then the prexifed ones probably will be ignored or still applied, either way your site wont change because the standard one is still in there. We will certainly not be going back over all our old sites and removing prefixes, it will take too much time. I also disagree about not using them… they are required right now to make it work across all browsers, so I dont understand why people say not to use them.
 
Lea Verou's -prefix-free solution looks good to auto-add prefixes.

I always say it depends on the end user… most of our customers are businesses, most of those are small businesses. Thier customers may be large corporations and public bodies. It is well known that large corporations and public bodies (ESPECIALLY public bodies like universities) are running XP still, which means IE8 or less. It is a big job cost for the uni, and a big for the IT department, to update everyone to Vista/Windows 7 or 8 so they can use IE9 or 10. The users themselves are pretty much locked out and cannot update it themselves (although Chrome allows non-admins to install, but you still have to rely on every computer having Chrome as the default which it wont).
 
So you have to ask yourself, will your website users (for me they are my customers' customers) be able to use the website effectively to the point they will not lose a sale or have a drop in visitors or high bounce rate? In my opinion if the site still looks and works in IE8 and less, then its fine, but if it does not work (any many websites developed by developers who dont bother with old browsers don't), then the website may have less visitors, high bounce rate etc. For me that is a NO NO because they are my customers customers, and I cannot have my customers lose sales because of my laziness.
 
So if its a critical feature for the end user, make it work, if its not then no worries. Rounded corners on a form submit button for example in my opinion will make no impact to the user using the site.
 
Nevertheless we still use CSS3 PIE to make sure radius and gradients all work in IE8 and below.
 
P.S. also to note, many of these users may have Javascript disabled too, so we also do not use HTML5 tags like <header> etc. because then the site WILL break in non-JS IE8 and below because you need JS to make HTML5 work for these browsers. Not saying all sites shouldnt but as stated above, it depends on the end user, and ours will be in universities/corporations who will have IE8 and below and some no-JS.

Oh, FFS.