As someone who has unfortunately decided to become a “creative person” “professionally”, it only took so long to realize that I had an entirely awful website. I will spend hundreds of hours working on apps, music, and visuals and never generate any kind of productive publicity because without a decent website, (replete with personality filled blog), nobody is going to care. I don’t expect job offers to come pouring in, but I want people to be able to communicate with people who might be interested in what im doing. Case in point, while in Japan I received a message from a rep from Ministry of Sound Australia about including a custom version of ARDJ with their latest Hed Kandi type CD. Unfortunately, it was sent via MYSPACE. I receive a couple of -My New Album On Beatport!!!- type messages and comments weekly, so I rarely check when my little MySpace folder on GMail lights up. So, I missed the deadline and never got a response back from the woman.
So, I’ve started building a webpage. I like minimal everything, so my webpage was decidedly that, just a few lines of text w/ hrefs, and my little icon that I stole from google image search. A couple of <br>’s later, I had a nice centered set of links to my various social networks and a design-unrelated tumblr with a few sparse embeds of things on my various social networks. As someone who had no interest in web design, I figured that was as far as I would go…
Turns out that it sucked. Google Analytics, perhaps prophetically, did not want to index my page for days and days, and then now that it finally has, I get like a hit a day. Not exactly worth the minimal effort I put in. So I figured I would bite the bullet, learn some web-dev so I can make my own webpages and layouts, and add a few more acronyms to my resume.
Resources
My first stop was stackoverflow.com, which in addition to being a great resource for iPhone programmers, is also pretty solid on general advice, like “Any advice for getting started in Web Programming/design?”. I took the advice of wheresrhys and checked out the wonderful tutorials at HTMLDog.com, and learned me some HTML and CSS.
After going through the beginner examples, I realized that it was actually kind of fun. I can create some minimal designs without a source full of <br>’s and with plug-ins like Firebug and Firefox Web Developer, I can get a sort of WYSIWYG CSS editor going. Almost reminds me of doing my Middle School’s web page back in 1996 with Frontpage. But there were a few hours of tutorials left to devour, so I figured I should finish those up, then probably pursue some other, more advanced tutorials on CSS, and then maybe some Javascript… oh and some PHP! And wtf is Ruby on Rails…
Keeping Momentum
But, I did what I think is the key to learning a new language quickly. I stopped reading and started coding, from scratch, what you see here. After about an hour of coding, I learned of the innumerable hacks of CSS, hatred of IE6 and below, and the apparent usage of Netscape 4. I found out that doing more than 2 columns in CSS is a real bitch, but there are some smooth ways of doing it. I hacked up a lot of example code with a goal of creating a grid system, and ended up with the happy accident you see here. Colors, as always, supplied by Colourlovers, one of my favorite websites. I generally trust the obsessives over there for any colors I use ever, from typography and computer visuals, to now web design. Maybe its cheating, and my web page is probably ugly, but I love it.
So anyway, I made the splash page thats on my tumblr now after only an hour or two, and loaded it up on Firefox as well as Google Chrome to check it. I really really loved it, but now had to figure out a way to integrate a CMS. This could have been a good way to start my knowledge of PHP and Javascript, but I have put those off for another day, instead finishing up those tutorials and making small edits to my design after each lesson.
Finishing Up
My number one tip for learning new languages quickly: After an hour, start coding something fun! Even if you have no experience programming, using the Processing language, you can make something neat within your first hour, and you’ll have a great start on the combination of design + programming. When I was learning the iPhone SDK, I did some of the excellent online Stanford University material and then quickly ported the Animal Kill Counter to the device.
Start small, and create something that is useful or fun to you, not necessarily to everyone (because then you have to worry about code maintenance, bugs, etc etc). Eventually, I would like to make this tumblr layout public, but it requires the aforementioned work, and I’m not done learning yet.
P.S. Use Smultron, it is amazing!
