Web Class Blog

The simple answer, is, NO. You do not have to learn HTML in order to build a website, or work on one successfully.

The long answer is, that if you DO learn a little about HTML, and a little about CSS (try the For Dummies Books), it will make life easier for you. Especially when it comes to troubleshooting display issues, and customizing the appearance of your website inside a CMS.

A grasp of the simpler parts of HTML, such as link tags, div and table tags, paragraph tags, and line breaks, will help you to be able to spot errors and inconsistencies, and correct them. It will help you know when you want to move something from one part of the code to another, just how much you need to move. And it will help you know how to remove a piece from the code without getting errors from it.

Those are all secondary skills though. To start with, you can manage without it, if you use either a good HTML editor program, or a CMS with a template that you like (or if you have a friend who can tweak it for you).

In our classes, we teach our students how to use tools first, then how to recognize various pieces that they are most likely to need to work with directly in code. But that isn’t the focus of the class. The classes focus on more important things – such as working with design elements, good copy, effective promotion, and functional layout and SEO. The things that really determine whether a site is likely to be functional or not.

Learning code does not make you a web designer. Code is perhaps one of the least necessary things to learn, and a basic grasp of it, combined with a good knowledge of other aspects of web design and related skills, will propel you further than you’ll go if you can hand-code.

Many classes which are taught about web design are theoretical. They take research into account, but they are taught with very little of real world experience. It is different in the trenches. When you have to consider the variables that come into play in real life, it puts a huge twist on what is learned in the average web related class.

When you are working within theory, you have more freedom than you do when you are working with a client – or even with your own needs. Consider the following factors that come into play:

1.Budget. This is something that becomes a factor for virtually every small business, and it may affect many aspects, including initial planning, and long term sustainability.
2.Time. A website takes a time commitment from both designer and owner, and reflects directly on costs, both visible, and hidden. Keeping time commitments manageable is almost always an issue.
3.Cooperation. Some clients cooperate, others do not, and you have to find ways to work with them.
4.Personal Preference. This is HUGE. You can do everything “right” and still have it be “wrong”. Or you may have to find another “right” way to do something so that it pleases a client.
5.Industry Standards. These change all the time. What is taught in most classes is obsolete by the time it is taught.
6.Adaptation of standards to reality. Standards are goals – and they aren’t always practical. Sometimes they have to be scaled down, or adapted, to meet realistic needs.
7.Target Market. This is different for each business. One size does not fit all!
8.Individual needs. The needs for function of each site is also unique. You may find that half of your clients have sites that take you outside the box in thinking about how to meet the need.
9.Business goals and objectives. A good website takes into account much more than just the site “spec”. It considers the total business scope, goals, and resources, then provides a solution that fits them all, so that it enhances the objectives of the business for growth and sustainability long term. This isn’t something you can learn from a scenario in a book, it is only learned from real life experiences.

The best kind of class will be taught by someone who actually does the work for a living. They can shed more light on the variations for solutions, and can help to think outside the box better when that is required.

The second issue is that people who do not work with it on a daily basis may not be aware of how intertwined the various aspects of a website are. It is only easy to compartmentalize in theory. In reality, the overlap is fairly pervasive, and you cannot be a true specialist in any one area without having a solid grounding in the other areas that affect it.

Training offered by an experienced teacher – that is, a teacher experienced in daily work with the tasks in question, will usually be more effective for these, and many other reasons.

So what does it all mean? Why would you want to take a class to learn this?

Tired of uploading pictures of the grandkids only to have them take forever to upload – or keep timing out so they never send? Ever put a picture on a web page to have it take an age to show up, or worse, not load at all? Cropping, scaling, and image types can solve these problems and more.

Think you’d like to put a shaped image over the top of another image so that the background showed through? How about creating a great text image for a site?  Basic image creation techniques can show you how to do that quickly.

Want to create a header for a website with a blended photo, or make a picture look extra special? Basic image creation and editing skills get the job done.

And if you think your brother really needs Klingon ridges on his forehead, or if you’d like to take your granddaughter’s finger out of her nose in that Christmas photo, intermediate retouching techniques allow you to do that, and more! Finally, you can get your ex out of that photo in such a professional way that nobody else will ever know they were there! We’ve done exactly these things (though it was someone else’s ex we removed from the photo, I’d never want to remove Kevin!).

Need to know what software you can afford, which one to do more creative things, or which tools are worth the money? Ever wanted to see how a drawing tablet works? These issues are addressed in both Image editing classes.

I’m really looking forward to teaching these classes, because images can be so much fun. Since the classes are not software specific (and free software is available if you need it), these are great classes to take if you are interested and wondering what you can accomplish with computer graphics, or if you have a need to understand how images work online.

Comment spam is something everyone thinks they can recognize. But it is getting harder to tell.

I always leave comments on my blogs moderated. Otherwise I’d be overrun by auto-spam.

Auto-commenting is an aggressive form of comment spam, and it is happening in many ways now. It used to be just the horrid old yucky stuff posted with a URL. Now it is more subtle.

Often you cannot pinpoint anything WRONG with the site in question, but it gives you the feeling that it is just a shortcut site – one where someone did not want to put up real content, so they quoted someone else’s posts and left a comment with link instead. Some people think this is an acceptable way to earn from an ad supported website. I do not.

A WordPress Blog allows you to moderate comments, and to mark them as spam. I suspect you have to have some kind of spam control software for that option to be of any good though, because it does not seem to make any difference, the spam keeps coming.

The most annoying thing about auto-spam is that once it gets through, it does not stop unless you find a way to stop it. If you leave comments unmoderated and a spambot finds it, they’ll keep posting, even if you set it to moderated – they’ve long moved on, and the bot just auto-sends to whatever it found on its first pass. No way to turn it off.

So the only way to tell if it is spam, is by taking control yourself, and actually looking. If you judge it to be spam, it is.

Two major things we see that make the difference between professional results in web design, and amateur results, are Experience, and Prioritization.

Some things can only be learned by experience. By having done a thing enough times to know the common pitfalls, to have a system to accomplish it in an efficient manner, and to have an idea of the things that MIGHT be potential problems even if you have not experienced those issues particularly in the past.

Experience is worth paying for – either by hiring someone to do the work, or by paying for a class so you can learn from someone else’s experience. Even then, some things won’t make sense until you actually do them yourself – when YOUR experience combines with the experience of the professionals whom you are relying on.

Prioritization is the other big issue. It often determines whether a site functions well on a limited budget, or whether it does not. It determines whether time is saved, or lost. It determines whether a site can be made functional in six weeks, or a year.

Good prioritization means the foundation is built well before other items are added. And it keeps necessary costs affordable.

These are the two biggest issues that people are likely to NOT understand the importance of before they get involved in a site build process. But they are the two things that, once they see what it means, will make the most difference in whether they have a good experience or a bad one.

Eight years ago, I saw my first website. Five months later, I got my first contract with the Town of Medicine Bow. In web terms, that was in the dark ages.

Back then, you could do that. It was all much simpler.

Things have changed. There are issues now that did not matter then – visitors have expectations, coding is more complex, software harder to learn, marketing issues are more difficult.

When I was learning, if you made a mistake, chances are you’d find out before harm occurred, and you could go on making improvements and learning.

Now, a mistake can kill your site, or your business, land you in court, or get you in trouble other ways.

It is just much harder to learn on your own. Most of the info out there is geared toward corporate web needs, not small business needs, a good deal more is outdated (with no way for you to know that), and some is outright wrong from the get-go.

A class can help you get hands on experience. The best kind of class will teach more than how to use a certain type of software – instead, it will teach the basics in all areas related to creating a website – and that is far more than mere web design!

The web world is changing fast. It is harder now than it was a few years ago to build a good site – but a good training class can give you the boost you need to be able to start with a good enough foundation to compete, long enough to get the site going well.

Great images for the web are not that hard to find, or produce. You just need to know where to look, and a few simple techniques to take an image from ho-hum, to ah-ha.

Web images are often photos, sometimes clipart, frequently text, and more and more often, complex combinations of all three. If you start with part of a message, you can often pull together other items to complete the message.

Sometimes it can be hard to find just the right image with just the right message to start with. When that happens, you may need to look a little further, or pay for an image when you hoped to get one free.

If you combine a photo, with some drawing, you’ve instantly set it apart, if the two work well together. When you add text, for something like a site header, the key to making it work well is choosing text that echoes the message, combined with effects on the text that reinforce both the message and readability.

Most techniques for editing images are really quite simple. Some require a steady hand, or special tools, but the most often used techniques are things that virtually anyone can do – applying a gradient, adjusting opacity, selectively blurring, enhancing color or contrast, or subtle retouching. Using them right makes dull images pop.

These are the techniques we begin to teach in our Beginning Images class, and cover in more depth in our Intermediate Images class, both of which are scheduled for this summer (and will be scheduled again in the fall).

I’ve been noticing some things since I started teaching last fall. Teaching has been one of the best things for my business.

I’ve learned to feel completely comfortable in front of strangers, and to introduce myself more easily. I’ve also learned how to teach without being glued to my notes (not sure my students think that is progress, but it provides a sense of freedom!).

Teaching also gives me a huge credibility boost. Makes me somewhat of an expert at what I do, and validates me to new clients and new students alike.

It is opening doors to other speaking opportunities also, which is really cool, because that is something I actually enjoy doing.

I remember when I got my first web contract, way back in 1999. I was terrified, almost shaking, having a hard time slowing down to actually speak. I had to present in front of the town council – now, understand, this is Medicine Bow we are talking about! 5 council members and a handful of town’s people who had gathered to watch the show (and the show they came to watch most certainly was not me!). I was terrifed, had tons of notes, and a printout of the old site and the proposed site design.

I’ve presented before councils many times since, but never been quite comfortable until the last few times. The experience of commanding a classroom has done that for me – given me speaking experience that has made me feel comfortable in front of nearly any audience.

I’ve presented to many organizations in the last year, and have done more and more training or informational presentations. Each one gets easier, and I look forward to more of them. Being required to explain technical and aesthetic concepts on the spur of the moment to a class of inquisitive students has helped me see that when you work with an audience of any kind, they are just people. If you can find a way to strike a chord with them, it becomes easy to enjoy the experience.

The image and graphics classes scheduled for this summer will require that you have some kind of Image Processing software. The class is NOT software specific – we will not be teaching you to use PhotoShop, or other popular image software. Rather, we’ll be teaching a set of common skills and techniques which are common to this kind of software.

Suitable software means something that is capable of producing professional quality graphics. We recommend one of the following:

Free Software

• The GIMP is about the only free one that is worth using. Others that we have tested simply could not do even basic tasks to a level that was acceptable. The GIMP though, is fairly flexible, and surprisingly functional, and will do to learn a good range of basic skills, along with some higher end professional tactics. You can download it from the net, free.

Commercial Software

• PhotoShop Elements is our number one recommendation for people with a limited budget, who need a range of good features.
• PhotoShop is the top recommendation for professional level graphics production, if you can afford it.
• PaintShop is also highly functional, and will do the job nicely.
• Painter, or Painter Essentials will work – but it is designed more for artistic use, and works quite differently. The learning curve is not the same as for regular paint  software.

There are a range of less functional software titles out there – but many have missing functions where they limit your ability to do essential tasks.

We will also discuss working with a graphics tablet in the Intermediate class. Our preferred tablet is the Wacom table – pretty much any one will do, and even a small one is a huge advantage for anyone who wants to create computer generated art. If you do not wish to paint, or do photo retouching or altering, then a Wacom won’t be of much use to you. Wacom tablets often come bundled with some version of PhotoShop Elements or Painter Essentials.

Graphics are pretty demanding on a computer, but most graphics software can run on even a limited system. It will be SLOW, but it will work.

The use of Adobe Illustrator, or other Vector Based Graphics software will not be covered. This kind of software operates on very different principles, and is used for different purposes.

One of the finer points of web design involves the use of colors. The eye does things to colors when they are in different environments.

Colors show up differently between monitors and print – most people who work with graphics quickly figure that out. And they quickly figure out that colors also look different from monitor to monitor. There will be variances in hue, saturation, or intensity.

But what they do not figure out easily, is that a color that is in a large block, will look different than a color that is in a thin line – even when you use exactly the same color. Or that a color on a contrasting background will look different than one on a white background – even when the color code is identical.

Experience teaches tricks to compensate for what the eye does – because on screen, it is not what it IS that matters, it is what it LOOKS like it is! Perception is often different than reality, and perception is the thing that matters most.

Using lines or boxes in certain ways can make them look warped also, even when they are not. It can be an interesting effect, but if unintended, just makes things look odd. A good example is at http://www.megafamilies.com – Look at the sidebars. They appear to curve in toward the darker blue headers boxes.

Adjusting for this kind of illusion means that you have to see what is, instead of assuming that because it is precise, that it is right! Sometimes we assume that if we want it to look the same, we need only MAKE something the same, and we don’t understand why it does not look the way we want. I find it interesting that people will know that something doesn’t look right, but won’t know why – so they won’t change it, even though they could easily experiment and figure out how to make it look right.

The eyes often play tricks on our perception of colors and space. Learning to compensate for those adds an extra level of polish to a site, bringing it into the realm of the professional.