See You in 1984

Below is a course description, minus the requirements, offered at a local community college.

DPR310. Introduction to Dreamweaver MX 2004

If you want to be a Web Designer, you need to know Dreamweaver MX 2004.
In this highly interactive, project-oriented course, a Web pro will help
you harness the full potential of this industry-standard development
too! You will find out how to create, arrange and format text, images,
hyperlinks, tables, and various other media types. You’ll also
examine intelligent page design—with a emphasis on avoiding common
layout errors.

By the way, I typed it exactly how it was printed.

That description really grinds my gears.

“If you want to be a Web Designer, you need to know Dreamweaver
MX 2004.”, what the hell? Wrong. You do not have to know Dreamweaver
MX 2004 if you want to be a Web Designer. On my first job in the industry
I was hand coding pages in notepad for two weeks before they provided
me with Dreamweaver. Also since Dreamweaver 8 has been released, how
about at least bringing your students up to date. Oh sorry, your a institution
of higher learning and your concerned about saving them money, yeah right.
Tools!

Maybe I received the rough draft copy, because the description does
not mention:

• CSS
• Web Standards
• XHTML
• Semantic Markup
• Accessibility

It is sad to see that this is what is being offered, with the notion that if you learn this tool you are on your way to be a Web Designer. Now what if your Dreamweaver crashes and you can’t get it back up and running. Are you now longer a Web Designer for the day?

For starters, I suggest people visit W3 Schools and learn HTML, learn XHTML, learn CSS.

Teach a man how to fish…

Web standards require much thought and preparation. However, in this busy world we live in nobody makes time for anything, just as long as it works. I believe that it does take an amount of thought and preparation, but what doesn’t if you want it done right; or is the goal to short change clients and ourselves just to get bye.

In the movie Road Trip, the character Rubin said, It’s supposed to be a challenge, it’s a shortcut! If it were easy it would just be the way. Well when it comes to slicing a design for the web, the shortcuts are easy and the way is the challenge.

When I first started working on the web, in 1996, all I knew was tables for layout and I thought that was the way things were done. Yet in the back of my mind I always said to myself there has to be a better way. Unfortunately I did not look for it, but in 2005, it found me. My co-worker James Boykin told me about something called CSS. He directed me to The Beauty in CSS Design which was the first resource that I used to begin learning about CSS and it uses.

The first site I sliced, using CSS, was my church site. I remember saying this is cool. Then I got hired by a wonderful web soultions company in Alexandria, VA. Where I am currently employed. I was so far behind the curve my challenge was to grasp CSS and keep projects on schedule. Well thanks to the help of the other webmasters there my knowledge of not only CSS, but web standards has grown exponentially. My knowledge continues to grow with sharing ideas with my fellow webmasters and reading such sites and blogs as:

• Don’t Meet Your Hero’s
• A List Apart
• The Web Standards Project
• Vitamin
• SimpleBits
• Veerle’S blog
• CSS Beauty
• Cameron Moll
• Andy Clarke
• Molly
• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Jason Santa Maria
• Andy Budd
• and many more…

Andy Budd’s book CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions really helped me understand CSS. If your interested in producing sites using CSS I definitely recommend reading that book. I also recommend regularly checking out the sites above and doing some exploration of your own for good CSS resources.

See there is no reason with all the resources I have listed that we can not adhere to webstandards. There’s even a checklist to help you out.

In and effort to promote webstandards, I’ve gone naked on my site and this blog. For more information visit CSS Naked Day.