Learning how NOT to do things

I have built plenty of websites for freelance, and I thought I had everything down. I know how to guide a client away from bad decisions, give advice that may go against what they want to do, get the information I need, and everything else that goes with starting a project. At least…I thought I did. I came across a problem with my latest project that I wasn’t really prepared for: building a site where the client wasn’t even sure what the whole idea was from the start. They knew what the basics were, but not the whole, and that is where I ran into trouble. It is because of this, that I learned how not to do things in the future. The most important being writing out the project’s scope.

Enter Closet Fish…

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They took our jerbs!

If you haven’t heard of Adobe’s latest offering, Muse, then you probably don’t read any web development blogs, including this one. If you do read them, and still haven’t heard of it, well, you have now! You may thank me for your enlightenment later. Anyway, there are a LOT of comments from web developers bashing the hell out of this product. I have not seen many (I can’t even recall one actually) comments praising it for what it does. What does it do? Write serious crappy code. I mean divititus to the umpteenth degree.

This product isn’t meant for my people though. Who do I mean by “my people”? I’m talking about those who hand code their sites and left software like Dreamweaver in the dust years back. Muse is meant for graphic designers, or web designers that don’t actually know how to create a site but design them anyway. They create a design, and then use Muse (which has tools like other Adobe products – think Photoshop) to make a nice little layout. Hit a button and BAM! Here is your website.

I think many of the people doing this for a living though feel a slight twinge of fear, thinking this might cut into our freelance projects, or possibly worse…our jobs.

Damn…that went all serious, didn’t it?

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Remember the magic?

When I started doing web development and design, Dreamweaver was THE program to use. Everyone was talking about it. When I first started using it, I was blown away. I spent hours upon hours creating fake sites trying to get the hang of everything. I even remember thinking about trying to get the Dreamweaver Certification that Adobe offered so I could put the logo on my first portfolio site. Everything was easy to understand because of the graphical interface and no real need to know HTML. This was in the days when tables were the way to go, and CSS was just getting started.

Then along comes a book called Dreamweaver 4 Magic, one of the authors being a guy name Al Sparber (which you can buy on Amazon for less than $1 now!). The book was awesome. It taught a lot of cool things you could do in Dreamweaver, and it taught me some basic HTML and CSS. Al Sparber though did more things that helped me grow as a developer – he created the site projectseven.com.

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