I had to give a speech in church last weekend, asking the congregation for volunteers for service in three-year terms on the board of trustees. I laid out the challenges that face us in the year and years ahead. I spoke of the problems with our building and how we would need to update much of it, soon. And I told how serving on the board had enriched my own life, and how it might be a good thing for others, too. After the service, during the social "Coffee Hour" more than a dozen people came up to me to say how much they had enjoyed my speech. Backs were slapped. Elbows were squeezed. I made it a point to ask each of them if they might consider volunteering their own time to serve on the board. And in every case, I was turned down.
This kind of thing can easily be a recurring theme in our lives.
We have all run up against overly-designed or unnecessarily-designed Web sites in our travels, I'm sure. You know the situation, where all you want is a new printer driver, or a .pdf of your local bike trails network or the office hours of the place you get a dog license. And instead of a simple page with high-contrast text and colors, lots of white space, headings and an eye toward what you really want or need, you are met with more than half a dozen fonts, usually in at least that many colors, and text of all sizes. Layout will be either constrained into a corner of your wide-screen monitor, or it will be stretched horizontally so wide that the entire page's content is only two or three lines deep on the page, the page header and footer only an inch or two apart because you don't have your browser sized in the same proportions as the original Web developer/designer did.
I tried to explain to a woman once that Web pages serve a purpose. They exist to pass along information. But some information really cries out to be passed along with a minimum of small-f flash and fancy. Imagine two small businesses in your town, a used musical instrument store and… a funeral home. Of the two, which site should present high-contrast acid-colored obscure fonts, animated imagery and even music that starts automatically when the page loads? If you said "The Funeral Store!" give yourself minus-twenty points. If you said "The used-guitar store!" give yourself five points. If you said "Animated graphics? Really? Like it was still 1998?", give yourself one hundred points.
Business folk refer to the Conversion Factor. How many impressions do you have to send out, to get how many sales? That fraction tells you how hard you have to work, to make a skillion dollars. If you only convince two people out of every hundred to do something, you're at two percent. If you want to make more money, all you have to do is see more people. That really is it. If you see a hundred in a day, you need to find a way to see two hundred people and, with no work on your technique, with no improvement in your rap, you will on average make twice as much as before. You can of course work on the other side of the equation, too. People who use prospect's names in their conversation close 25% more sales. People who are good listeners close 25% more sales. People with good grooming and hygiene close 25% more sales. People who hand-write follow-up letters close 25% more sales… at some point, you raise yourself from closing two out of a hundred, to closing three out of a hundred. Now, even without seeing any more people, you're making half-again as much. And if you can manage to do both, you end up making not twice as much, but three times as much.
I was very effective as an entertainer, as a comedian, maybe. But I wasn't very effective as a speaker. My task was not to show people how clever I was, or give them inspiring things to think about for the week ahead. My job was to shake the trees and scare up candidates for the board of trustees, and at that job I feel like I failed, that day.
You may have Web pages that are not as effective as you'd like. The task before you is similar to my own. You can either get more people to view your page, or you can make your page better.
We'll talk about this in the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions, this would be a good time to get them in.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Limits
It happened again, last week: Someone asked if they had to "learn it all" or if there weren't some areas they could shortcut and leave to others?
We are kind of lucky, here at UNL, in that there are just so many of us, in many ways. If you don't have the time or the talent for something, there is probably someone, somewhere, who can help to take up the slack.
If you were interested in opening up your own Web design shop, I would say "Yes", you probably should get as deep into every aspect of the business, including Business, as you possibly can. But even there, a lot of people would make the case that you should not probably try to do your own taxes and business accounting. They would advocate leaving that stuff to the professionals. It's a busy world, and keeping up with technology and tax law may be more than most people should try to handle.
Photoshop is a wonderful tool, but it is intimidating, and a great many of the features and tools in Photoshop are difficult to even explain, let alone learning them. And in its way, Photoshop is like Microsoft Word. You get a skillion features and tools, each designed to accommodate professionals working in their particular field. But learning how to set up your page margins and inter-paragraph spacing isn't going to turn you into Stephen King. You still need to bring some talent to bear on the task of editing your graphics or images, to get the most from Adobe Photoshop.
Thankfully, most of our image-editing needs are pretty simple. We resize images, we crop them, maybe we change a color to better match something already on our pages. From time to time you may want to take power lines out of a sky or clean up some RedEye flashbulb issues. That's about it.
But even getting that far in Photoshop requires a bit of time and talent, and someone to explain it in a book, on a Web site or in person. Then, after a little practice, you've got it down.
We deal in HTML, which has not changed appreciably since Bill Clinton was president. Those days are over, and a lot of Web professionals are looking forward to HTML5, now. We will see a continuance of most of what we knew in HTML 4.01 (the paragraph tag isn't about to change) but there will be new ways of doing old things, and there will be new things we can finally do, in HTML5.
Cascading Stylesheets have been around since Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4, but support really wasn't there until Internet Explorer 6. Today we're hearing things about IE9, and how it will make our lives easier. We'll see. Along the way, we have seen support advance as the standards moved from CSS to CSS3 specification. Talk to anyone who did this for a living ten years ago and they will speak with a mixture of both pride and relief that they learned all of the hacks to make CSS work in more than one or two browsers, and they don't have to do this, any more.
Dreamweaver has grown and changed. Dreamweaver 1, 2 and 3 were honestly just cheap ways for me to upgrade my real favorite Web editor, HomeSite. But starting with Dreamweaver MX 2000 the program offered some compelling reasons to learn its new features and workflows and to keep using it through Dreamweaver MX 2004, Dreamweaver 8, Dreamweaver CS3 and CS4. There's no reason to believe they are about to muck it up with Dreamweaver CS5, either.
Still, if you can sketch out a Web design in Photoshop, and you have a lot of Webby friends, there may be little reason for you to ever spend the calories learning HTML and CSS, though doing so would inform many of your design decisions, I'm sure. If you are great at HTML and CSS but do not understand Layers and gradients or why you would use .gif or .jpeg formats or how to switch between the two in Photoshop, you can probably lean on someone who can turn out the work you need in half the time, or less, that it would take you to do it alone.
My dad was always one of those who thought that learning to change your own oil and learning to change your own flat tires would make you a better driver. I am my father's son. I know it will take longer, but I really think you should try to learn it all, and to learn as much as you can about everything, because it all works together, now.
We are kind of lucky, here at UNL, in that there are just so many of us, in many ways. If you don't have the time or the talent for something, there is probably someone, somewhere, who can help to take up the slack.
If you were interested in opening up your own Web design shop, I would say "Yes", you probably should get as deep into every aspect of the business, including Business, as you possibly can. But even there, a lot of people would make the case that you should not probably try to do your own taxes and business accounting. They would advocate leaving that stuff to the professionals. It's a busy world, and keeping up with technology and tax law may be more than most people should try to handle.
Photoshop is a wonderful tool, but it is intimidating, and a great many of the features and tools in Photoshop are difficult to even explain, let alone learning them. And in its way, Photoshop is like Microsoft Word. You get a skillion features and tools, each designed to accommodate professionals working in their particular field. But learning how to set up your page margins and inter-paragraph spacing isn't going to turn you into Stephen King. You still need to bring some talent to bear on the task of editing your graphics or images, to get the most from Adobe Photoshop.
Thankfully, most of our image-editing needs are pretty simple. We resize images, we crop them, maybe we change a color to better match something already on our pages. From time to time you may want to take power lines out of a sky or clean up some RedEye flashbulb issues. That's about it.
But even getting that far in Photoshop requires a bit of time and talent, and someone to explain it in a book, on a Web site or in person. Then, after a little practice, you've got it down.
We deal in HTML, which has not changed appreciably since Bill Clinton was president. Those days are over, and a lot of Web professionals are looking forward to HTML5, now. We will see a continuance of most of what we knew in HTML 4.01 (the paragraph tag isn't about to change) but there will be new ways of doing old things, and there will be new things we can finally do, in HTML5.
Cascading Stylesheets have been around since Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4, but support really wasn't there until Internet Explorer 6. Today we're hearing things about IE9, and how it will make our lives easier. We'll see. Along the way, we have seen support advance as the standards moved from CSS to CSS3 specification. Talk to anyone who did this for a living ten years ago and they will speak with a mixture of both pride and relief that they learned all of the hacks to make CSS work in more than one or two browsers, and they don't have to do this, any more.
Dreamweaver has grown and changed. Dreamweaver 1, 2 and 3 were honestly just cheap ways for me to upgrade my real favorite Web editor, HomeSite. But starting with Dreamweaver MX 2000 the program offered some compelling reasons to learn its new features and workflows and to keep using it through Dreamweaver MX 2004, Dreamweaver 8, Dreamweaver CS3 and CS4. There's no reason to believe they are about to muck it up with Dreamweaver CS5, either.
Still, if you can sketch out a Web design in Photoshop, and you have a lot of Webby friends, there may be little reason for you to ever spend the calories learning HTML and CSS, though doing so would inform many of your design decisions, I'm sure. If you are great at HTML and CSS but do not understand Layers and gradients or why you would use .gif or .jpeg formats or how to switch between the two in Photoshop, you can probably lean on someone who can turn out the work you need in half the time, or less, that it would take you to do it alone.
My dad was always one of those who thought that learning to change your own oil and learning to change your own flat tires would make you a better driver. I am my father's son. I know it will take longer, but I really think you should try to learn it all, and to learn as much as you can about everything, because it all works together, now.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The Learning
I get asked all of the time some variation of What’s the best way to learn all of this Web Stuff?
It’s an interesting question, because to me it always presupposes that one can learn it all. But the questioner is always more interested in the learning-y part than the all-part of their question, so I usually let it slide.
We are all individuals (Just like everyone else! I love that joke).
But it’s true. Someone like me is going to do well reading about something, most days. I can back up a page or a paragraph or two and take another run at it, if I don’t quite get something. I can take a book or a magazine with me to the doctor’s waiting room, or the laundromat. I don’t need a plug, or an appointment. I just need light.
Other people are more do-ers. They can watch something, they can read about it, they can listen to someone describe it dozens of times, but until they actually do something, it is all just theory to them.
I never know who of these types is going to attend my training sessions. I know the names of the people, but I don’t get a handle on whether this one is a reader, that one is a listener, or these two both have to do something, in order to get it. So I have tried to design my training so it incorporates a little of all of them.
There are a lot of words on the screen at any time, probably too many for some. But I’d rather have people skip over something than not have it there for them. I know the panic of needing an answer late at night and not knowing where to get it. And each course is designed to stand alone. You can come in at two in the morning and click through how to install Dreamweaver and probably get it done, in other words. If you have a few moments and want to learn about Templates, or refresh your knowledge of Templates, then have at it. It’s all there. If you have questions we can cover them in e-mail.
But I try not to read everything on screen. That would be awful. The information is there for the readers. For the listeners, I try to tell a slightly different version, and it’s probably slightly different from class to class, too. I may leave this or that part out, or focus more on something that someone asked about earlier. And at the end of each page or so I try to have a moment of, essentially, “Now, YOU do it!”
People get done earlier than others. People struggle with this or that part. I try to talk them through it, or we spend that time going over questions anyone might have about anything we have covered. When we are done, we move on to the next thing.
The nice thing is that this has all been going on for a while, now. The first HTML books and seminars weren’t all that great. Elizabeth Castro’s Visual QuickStart Guide to HTML is in its Sixth Edition, today. And a lot of that is repeat business, I’m sure. A whole lot of Idjit’s Manuals and Learn It All In An Hour titles are gone, by now. So if you learn best by reading, you have some terrific options out there.
In the same vein, A List Apart crosses the country with terrific in-person training and seminars. All of the stars of Web Development show up for these.
I love that everyone is different, responds differently to differing inputs and yet still arrives at the same destination, somehow. What works best, for you?
It’s an interesting question, because to me it always presupposes that one can learn it all. But the questioner is always more interested in the learning-y part than the all-part of their question, so I usually let it slide.
We are all individuals (Just like everyone else! I love that joke).
But it’s true. Someone like me is going to do well reading about something, most days. I can back up a page or a paragraph or two and take another run at it, if I don’t quite get something. I can take a book or a magazine with me to the doctor’s waiting room, or the laundromat. I don’t need a plug, or an appointment. I just need light.
Other people are more do-ers. They can watch something, they can read about it, they can listen to someone describe it dozens of times, but until they actually do something, it is all just theory to them.
I never know who of these types is going to attend my training sessions. I know the names of the people, but I don’t get a handle on whether this one is a reader, that one is a listener, or these two both have to do something, in order to get it. So I have tried to design my training so it incorporates a little of all of them.
There are a lot of words on the screen at any time, probably too many for some. But I’d rather have people skip over something than not have it there for them. I know the panic of needing an answer late at night and not knowing where to get it. And each course is designed to stand alone. You can come in at two in the morning and click through how to install Dreamweaver and probably get it done, in other words. If you have a few moments and want to learn about Templates, or refresh your knowledge of Templates, then have at it. It’s all there. If you have questions we can cover them in e-mail.
But I try not to read everything on screen. That would be awful. The information is there for the readers. For the listeners, I try to tell a slightly different version, and it’s probably slightly different from class to class, too. I may leave this or that part out, or focus more on something that someone asked about earlier. And at the end of each page or so I try to have a moment of, essentially, “Now, YOU do it!”
People get done earlier than others. People struggle with this or that part. I try to talk them through it, or we spend that time going over questions anyone might have about anything we have covered. When we are done, we move on to the next thing.
The nice thing is that this has all been going on for a while, now. The first HTML books and seminars weren’t all that great. Elizabeth Castro’s Visual QuickStart Guide to HTML is in its Sixth Edition, today. And a lot of that is repeat business, I’m sure. A whole lot of Idjit’s Manuals and Learn It All In An Hour titles are gone, by now. So if you learn best by reading, you have some terrific options out there.
In the same vein, A List Apart crosses the country with terrific in-person training and seminars. All of the stars of Web Development show up for these.
I love that everyone is different, responds differently to differing inputs and yet still arrives at the same destination, somehow. What works best, for you?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Teaching
I love teaching. I really do.
In my cubicle, I have four pictures of people. There’s a photo of me hugging my wife. Her long hair hangs in streams across her face and we both have huge, happy smiles. I have a pair of photos of two pilots I admire, Charles Lindbergh, standing next to his Spirit of St. Louis, and Amelia Earhart.
The last photo is of a writer I admire, who was also a teacher. His last book, in fact, was called Teacher Man. Francis “Frank” McCourt is probably best known for his Angela’s Ashes and less so for ‘Tis. But to me, he was first a teacher.
There is something wonderful to me in the act of imparting knowledge to someone. Teaching. People come in the room and sit down and an hour or so later they leave and they look the same, but they’re different. They walk out of the room carrying some new morsel of wisdom they didn’t have when they walked in.
I love what I call the Lightbulb Moment. In cartoons, when they need to indicate that someone has just had an idea, they illustrate this by putting a lit lightbulb above the head of the thinker. There occasionally is a moment when you can see in someone’s face that Now, They Get It! Maybe one time out of a dozen it happens but when it does, it’s all worth it, for me.
I have been a teacher all my life. I can remember showing neighbor kids how to ride a bike. I can remember showing classmates how to color. In High School I made gas money by giving guitar lessons in peoples’ homes. I’d walk in and sit with you and your guitar and point out a different voicing of a chord or some new technique and answer a few questions and then leave with a few extra bucks, but leaving that knowledge behind.
I taught people how to Write. On the old GEnie network, I helped people with query letters, plot outlines, or suggested markets they might sell their stories to. Shortly after this, I started teaching people how to use GEnie, itself. They learned how to read their e-mail and how to download files and how to participate in online conversations. I have been teaching people how to go online and get things done since 1987.
I taught aviation ground school, after a fashion. It was online, in the Aviation Forum of The Microsoft Network. Someone would post a question about the regulations that were in effect at the time, or mention they were having trouble perfecting their short-field landing technique or something like that. We’d work it out. And people would come back and announce they had soloed or they had received their Private Pilot certificate at long last and we all would celebrate, because we all had a part in it.
And so today, there are people out there enjoying making music, being paid to write or just enjoying the writing process, spending time online and even flying airplanes, in some small part because of something that I said or did or wrote. That’s a really great feeling.
I used to complain because of the temporary nature of so much of technology. Those Intel commercials aside, nobody much celebrates the folks who brought us the 3½″ floppy disc, any more. Or the old ZMODEM file transfer protocol. When was the last time you marveled at the efficiency of your local bank-in-a-box ATM? Someone wrote the code for that. Someone stressed about it. Someone wondered half-way through it all if it wouldn't have been better to do that routine this way instead of that way, and even though it meant tearing out a week’s worth of code, they did it—knowing that not one person in a hundred would know or care. They did it because it was the Right Thing.
I used to complain because my first Web page is gone, now. It doesn’t even exist on the WayBack Machine at the Internet archive. In fact, the first couple hundred Web pages I built are gone, now. I used to think if I had it to do all over again I’d come back as an Architect. How cool would it be to drive by an entire building, maybe one that people recognized, one that defined a city skyline, and know that it was once just an idea of yours? That has to be a really satisfying feeling.
But then I realized that I have that, here and now. Saturday mornings, in the summer of 1995, Molly Holzschlag sat with us on the other end of a modem and taught us all HTML. I have asked Molly before, “How many seeds are in an apple? And how many apples are in a seed?” The fruit, pardon the expression, of her labors fifteen years ago is still renewing itself. Three or four times a month, I teach an introductory HTML class. Three or four times a month, I teach a more advanced version. The same goes for Dreamweaver, and so on. And those people wander out of the classroom a little better prepared to handle the challenges of their jobs. And some of them, I know, have already taught others. And so from Molly, though me to them, to others... it continues.
I don’t know what you did, today. But I taught someone something. And you’re right: It’s a great feeling.
In my cubicle, I have four pictures of people. There’s a photo of me hugging my wife. Her long hair hangs in streams across her face and we both have huge, happy smiles. I have a pair of photos of two pilots I admire, Charles Lindbergh, standing next to his Spirit of St. Louis, and Amelia Earhart.
The last photo is of a writer I admire, who was also a teacher. His last book, in fact, was called Teacher Man. Francis “Frank” McCourt is probably best known for his Angela’s Ashes and less so for ‘Tis. But to me, he was first a teacher.
There is something wonderful to me in the act of imparting knowledge to someone. Teaching. People come in the room and sit down and an hour or so later they leave and they look the same, but they’re different. They walk out of the room carrying some new morsel of wisdom they didn’t have when they walked in.
I love what I call the Lightbulb Moment. In cartoons, when they need to indicate that someone has just had an idea, they illustrate this by putting a lit lightbulb above the head of the thinker. There occasionally is a moment when you can see in someone’s face that Now, They Get It! Maybe one time out of a dozen it happens but when it does, it’s all worth it, for me.
I have been a teacher all my life. I can remember showing neighbor kids how to ride a bike. I can remember showing classmates how to color. In High School I made gas money by giving guitar lessons in peoples’ homes. I’d walk in and sit with you and your guitar and point out a different voicing of a chord or some new technique and answer a few questions and then leave with a few extra bucks, but leaving that knowledge behind.
I taught people how to Write. On the old GEnie network, I helped people with query letters, plot outlines, or suggested markets they might sell their stories to. Shortly after this, I started teaching people how to use GEnie, itself. They learned how to read their e-mail and how to download files and how to participate in online conversations. I have been teaching people how to go online and get things done since 1987.
I taught aviation ground school, after a fashion. It was online, in the Aviation Forum of The Microsoft Network. Someone would post a question about the regulations that were in effect at the time, or mention they were having trouble perfecting their short-field landing technique or something like that. We’d work it out. And people would come back and announce they had soloed or they had received their Private Pilot certificate at long last and we all would celebrate, because we all had a part in it.
And so today, there are people out there enjoying making music, being paid to write or just enjoying the writing process, spending time online and even flying airplanes, in some small part because of something that I said or did or wrote. That’s a really great feeling.
I used to complain because of the temporary nature of so much of technology. Those Intel commercials aside, nobody much celebrates the folks who brought us the 3½″ floppy disc, any more. Or the old ZMODEM file transfer protocol. When was the last time you marveled at the efficiency of your local bank-in-a-box ATM? Someone wrote the code for that. Someone stressed about it. Someone wondered half-way through it all if it wouldn't have been better to do that routine this way instead of that way, and even though it meant tearing out a week’s worth of code, they did it—knowing that not one person in a hundred would know or care. They did it because it was the Right Thing.
I used to complain because my first Web page is gone, now. It doesn’t even exist on the WayBack Machine at the Internet archive. In fact, the first couple hundred Web pages I built are gone, now. I used to think if I had it to do all over again I’d come back as an Architect. How cool would it be to drive by an entire building, maybe one that people recognized, one that defined a city skyline, and know that it was once just an idea of yours? That has to be a really satisfying feeling.
But then I realized that I have that, here and now. Saturday mornings, in the summer of 1995, Molly Holzschlag sat with us on the other end of a modem and taught us all HTML. I have asked Molly before, “How many seeds are in an apple? And how many apples are in a seed?” The fruit, pardon the expression, of her labors fifteen years ago is still renewing itself. Three or four times a month, I teach an introductory HTML class. Three or four times a month, I teach a more advanced version. The same goes for Dreamweaver, and so on. And those people wander out of the classroom a little better prepared to handle the challenges of their jobs. And some of them, I know, have already taught others. And so from Molly, though me to them, to others... it continues.
I don’t know what you did, today. But I taught someone something. And you’re right: It’s a great feeling.
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