Tell us about yourself Maleika.

Maleika Attawel: I’m a German front-end web designer who is particularly passionate about design and art. I’ve studied Philology, Philosophy, and Literature at the University of Hamburg. For a few years now, I’ve been fully dedicated to designing for the web with web standards. This is the career I’ve chosen for myself as it’s what best describes me and what I can do for others.

What’s Dotkraft about?

Maleika Attawel: My site is geared towards being a personal portfolio and a blog on web standards, typography, design aspects, information architecture, and many more subjects relating to modern accessible and usable web design. The site is still very young but I’m confident it’ll grow gradually with time.

On a technical note the site is hand coded with valid CSS and HTML strict.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine?

Maleika Attawel: I’ve worked with various CMS solutions for the past couple of years and none of them allowed for the flexibility that ExpressionEngine has proven to have in my relative short time using it. ExpressionEngine is very intuitive, has a very intelligent information structure, and is fun to learn and comprehend. It’s a joy working with ExpressionEngine which is why I decided for the commercial ExpressionEngine version instead of choosing a less optimal open source alternative. And it was well worth it.

What’s your favorite ExpressionEngine feature?

Maleika Attawel: My absolute favorite ExpressionEngine feature is the intelligent and flexible setup of custom fields. This is almost unfair to say because there are many standard ExpressionEngine features that I find to be invaluably wonderful. The custom field setup allows you to do just about anything and, so far I’ve not come to find any limitations. Whether it’s a gallery, a review system, a magazine, you can literally make ExpressionEngine do exactly what you want, how you want (which is a rarity). The custom fields play a big part in that flexibility and allow for me - as a designer - to concentrate on design tasks instead of having to spend hours upon hours working around programming specific deficits that most of the other content management solutions I’ve used in the past are affected by.

How did you go from Philology, Philosophy, and Literature to web development?

Maleika Attawel: The reasons for having studied these fields stem from a rather chaotic logic I had back in the day. I have always been very enthusiastic about Philosophy and languages, so I felt these fields were appropriate to study. Soon (though not soon enough for my liking) I realized that my true passion was somewhere else. I’ve always been the ‘artsy fartsy’ type and have created ‘nice looking’ things such as sketches from age 2. While I like to think in logic patterns occasionally, I don’t feel like stressing those cerebral areas of my brain too much, which is why I’m not a programmer ...

Is it true that German beer is better than American beer?

Maleika Attawel: I’m afraid I’m only German from the outside, even if that is not apparent on first sight ... In other words, I really don’t like beer.

Are you using any ExpressionEngine add-ons?

Maleika Attawel: So far, I have not developed any plugins or extensions. I doubt I will be as I’m not a programmer.

I use a few plugins, but have tried to avoid using too many and getting the most out of ExpressionEngine without add-ons which has worked quite nicely so far. A few add-ons that I’m using:

Character Limiter
No Follow
Gravatar
FreeForm

Anything else you want to tell us about?

Maleika Attawel: Yes, definitely. But that is out of the scope of any human readable and tolerable interview.