ureadit

You may have noticed that I haven’t blogged lately. It is not that I’m ignoring ureadit; on the contrary, I’ve been very busy putting together some good articles for the Solutions Page. Also, I’ve been working on a Flash-based program that can be used to help create closed-captioning for Flash movies. (I plan to make a limited number of copies available soon so that people can beta-test and provide feedback. Stay tuned!) Additionally, I do have a full time job that I need to maintain in order to remain financially secure. Of course, I’d love to blog all day, but so far, I’ve only made enough money in blogging to super-size my meal at McDonalds.

Most importantly, I’ve been spending a lot of time helping my wife out with her site. She runs a personal blog that chronicles her life in the U.S. Having just emigrated from the Netherlands about a year ago, she has some very good insights and experiences to relate. And she’s finding that there are a lot of people interested in what she has to say. And, hey, she’s getting a lot more traffic than me at this point, so I’m giving her as much help as possible.

We recently gave her WordPress-based website a face-lift. We’ve been using the website template software from Artisteer (one of the companies on my affiliate list). It’s a rare occasion that I can say I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of software that costs more than $100, and Artisteer is one of them. There are a few bugs, however, especially when dealing with their Joomla-generated templates. But as I explain to all my colleagues, I’d rather spend a few hours debugging code than a few months creating it from scratch.

And now – the moment you’ve been waiting for – I’ll actually make a point: 

Developing anything technical is difficult, and it takes a lot of time and brainpower.

For example, you’d think that creating web-pages is an easy task, what with all the software tools available like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, CoffeeCup Software, etc. But you still have to “drop down” and “get dirty” if you really want to make your site something worth while. Well, you could also pay someone else to do it for you, but finding good help at a reasonable price is not always easy. In any case, web development, like many technologies today, is still in its infancy, and people who want something that looks really cool are just going to have to pay for it in sweat or dollars.

Take Dreamweaver, for example. Dreamweaver allows you to create and debug web pages, but its use demands that you know a little something about HTML and CSS. (PHP and JavaScript are a big help too!) Quite often, you’ll find yourself writing lines of HTML and CSS. The value in Dreamweaver lies not in its simplicity. It is fairly complicated; however, it allows you to create fairly complicated sites much easier than coding them by hand. Hey, I’m okay with that. I’m an engineer, and I don’t mind getting my hands dirty if it means that I get what I want. I just get a bit concerned when I see people getting fooled into thinking that the software will create the site for them. It won’t.

I’ve often been put off by advertisement that say things like, “Create web pages without writing a single line of HTML.” Well, of course you can do that. Just head over to Go Daddy and pay a hundred dollars or so, and you’ll have a website in minutes. The problem is that the resulting website will be about as boring as watching a paperclip. And if you try to take it to the next level, you’ll start running into limitations right away. Either the site itself will not allow you to take certain liberties to do something unique, and/or you’ll start running into a situation that is so complicated that it sort of defeats the purpose of going with Go Daddy in the first place – that is, to make a website quickly and easily. This might discourage some people from actually taking it to the next step and create something really awesome.

On the other hand, companies like Go Daddy would not get much business if they said, “Hey, this stuff is complicated, so don’t even try it.” Nope. I’m thinking that won’t work.

The reality is that some people will take the deep dive and put in the time and effort to produce something really worth while. And they’ll make it look easy. But they aren’t fooling me; I know the truth – building a truly great website takes a lot of time and sweat.

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