I usually sit with them and point and click and explain, “See this? This is why we don’t do this…” and “See that? I wouldn’t recommend doing it like that” and so on. After an interval, or since I’m reading a lot of turn-of-the-last-century books lately, after a fullness of time, we get it worked out. Pages and jobs and careers are saved. Bands play, parades are organized and someone promises to name all of their children “Mark” in my honor. This gives me a nice, fuzzy, warm feeling. Really, it does. But come on—it’s not rocket science and it really isn’t all that difficult once you know what you are doing.
But that’s just it. They don’t know what they are doing. Or they are terribly unsure. They hand out the platitudes like candy—one gal used to call me an “HTML God” in an overly-exaggerated and not-cute insincere way. Rather than say something like that to me, I would have preferred she dedicate thirty minutes a week to learning. That’s really all it takes. It doesn’t even have to be thirty minutes all in one day.
At the height of the dot-bomb, there were quite a few computer book series with deceptive names like Learn ABC in 24 Hours. The hook was that most people think they will learn it all in a day, but the book was basically divided up into twenty-four hour-long lessons, each of which nearly always took me longer than an hour to complete. But the germ of the idea is perfect: Carve up the difficult task at hand into dozens of smaller portions that you can handle.
Maybe for you that means an afternoon every week; maybe it’s only an hour. Maybe, it’s only ten minutes, today. The point is that it all adds up. If there are, in fact, 4287 things to learn, and you knock off ten minutes and pick up two things, then you only have 4285 things left to learn.
Sure, it requires an investment. You have to spend, at least, some time. You probably have to spend some money, but the amount is surprisingly little. Most of my training sessions run $40 as this is written, and at least one is free! You can find very good reference and learning material at giveaway prices. For a penny, you could afford to place copies of the HTML book I recommend most often in your car, in your cubicle, in your lunchbox, in your living room and at your bedside and even get a copy for your, uh, Reading Room. You know, the one with the really great acoustics. You can’t even get gum from machines any more for a penny, but you can learn HTML to the level of the best experts out there. Such a deal!
I know a lot, sure. I have been doing this since 1993. Start today and you can learn it all, too. Remember, I didn’t learn it all in an afternoon, or over a weekend. And I didn’t learn it all from books, either. Most of it comes from building some truly awful pages, laughing, crying and starting over. Make a mistake. Try to fix it. Read-up on it and ask around, see if you can solve the problem on your own and then move on.
I am, I keep reminding people, a sweetie. But I am not a deity and I was nor born with the knowledge I have today. Look in the newspaper every day, I like to point out, and you’ll see birth announcements for little boys and little girls. I have been reading these for years and have never seen a eight-pound, four-ounce Web Designer born. Web Designers are made. Make yourself into one. Start today.
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