Posts tagged life

I normally write to those web developers/programmers who are already good, experienced, and thus the articles are somewhat advanced.
But today I got up feeling nostalgic I guess, or I just felt like remembering back on my www birth, on my first impression of the Internet, my first site online, my first steps in w3c standards, the day I discovered CSS, my first table-less layout, the day i realized IE was total crap... In a few words, I wanted to talk about all the special events in a web designer life.

So first you realize you want to do something that you think will make you rich and famous, and you realize that millions of people go in Internet everyday, so you believe that if you learn how to design a website you will have those millions of visits. Come on, all of us once believed that was true

So from here some take on an html/Dreamweaver course or they buy a book. I'm more of the book buyer, but I know many signed up in a class. It is now that you learn the basics, and you design a table-based website, which is about... Your favorite computer game! (Or pet, or music group, but it is always of that sort... ) And from there you start Your Own Website! which is about you, and you make it sound "professional", and you show it to your friends and they are totally amazed!
By now you feel like you are a genius, and suddenly, as you are in Dreamweaver doing some crappy tabled design, you look into the source code for any reason, and you find something that astonishes you, CSS styles at the top!
You are feeling surprised, and when you start playing with it Dreamweaver pulls down this enormous drop down of available things to do, and you are totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities you've found! So you just experiment for a while.
If you haven't done so already you get your own free domain, which always looks like "alexwebdesign.freewebsites.com" or something of that sort...
Either now or before CSS you find those "Cool JavaScript snippets" sites, and you fill up your site with "snow falling" and "mouse trails" and the weather, and the time, and all sorts of totally stupid things you think are cool... But don't blame yourself, we all did it...

You are starting to feel quite an expert, but you want to do one of those "Contact forms" that are so cool and different from your "mailto:..." hyperlinks, and you go into a forum and ask how they actually send the email, and they will probably tell you "PHP does it", and of course your next question is "php?"

And yet again you seem to see a new horizon appear in front of your eyes, full of new paths to explore, new ways of discovering the boudless capabilities that web development is opening for you.
At some point here you find that there is something called Databases, that you can use to dynamically store and display data, and you want to test them right away.
Your first dynamically generated pages take you about a week to get them to work properly. You struggle to do a simple INSERT query, but you are happy, of course.

If you felt like an expert before you now think that you could even create a replica of Google if you wanted, and in your high, you take on a dynamic website, with user registration and all of those cool things you've seen so many times. That website has your name on the footer of every single page, and it is usually about Gaming, Books, Music, Tutorials, or Animals. When you think you are done you are astonished to see that not even one user registers! And you suddenly find out that for the world you don't even exist...
You try to find yourself in Google a week after you make the website public, and it isn't there... You know nothing about SEO, you think that Google "magically" finds the websites, until yours is listed.
Once that happens you start asking how and why, and you dive into the world of SEO, PR, rankings and stats. You install Google Adsense and Google Analytics or similar software, and you check both everyday...

It is at this point where you either continue and become a good web developer (After lots, and lots, and lots of practice and reading), or you quit and remember it as an interesting adventure for the rest of your life.

If you chose the first alternative (Which I did, although I missed the "being good and practicing a lot" ) you'll start to get clients, and work, and you suddenly realize it has become tedious, having no freedom to chose when and what to do... But well, it is now a job so...
Most of us also start a blog now, and here I don't know about the rest, but I was TOTALLY surprised to see the stats... I have to say it has been incredibly amazing and all thanks to you guys, so yea, check out where you are in the line, and see what you've got ahead

Enjoy,