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The Danger of Dreamweaver (Part 3)

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The Danger of Dreamweaver (Part 3) Saturday morning, 27 May 2006

Welcome to the final installment of my Danger of Dreamweaver series. Having seen how dangerous DW can be in the hands of a ‘web professional’ and the reasons companies choose to stick to it in parts one and two respectively, i’m going to take a look at the alternatives that can lead to better sites and more money!

The Money Makers

Money can be made in two ways- you can save money by reducing costs, or you can earn extra money through new channels. Successful companies tend to do both. By ditching the rule of DW and embracing learning technology instead of software you can make money in both of these ways:

Saving

DW is not all that cheap, why not save by ditching it and let your team choose the text editor they like best and get them all a decent FTP client. Of course, this is down to personal preference, some may use DW as their text editor which is still fine.

Also, once you can code properly, especially CSS, it is much faster building websites ‘by hand’ than by using DW. You’ll save on project time, bandwidth and maintenance should be easier on a well thought out site.

Earning

The juicy bit! When you start learning the technologies of HTML/CSS/Javascript etc, instead of DW, you’ll find you have new things to up-sell on the sites our produce. For example, you should offer basic print style sheets as a given, but you can up-sell to gorgeous print optimised styles with a beautiful hi-resolution logo.

Once you’re writing proper HTML you can offer better interactive experiences with javascript too. Instead of iffy things that will break if javascript is disabled, you can sell useful enhancements that will still work even when javascript isn’t enabled. Or how about style-sheet switchers. You could produce special high-contrast style sheets for those old fogies that wear glasses! Or how about a style-sheet that updates the site with more festive colours for holidays, a bit of PHP to include it on the correct days and you’re away.

Of course, none of this can happen if you’re team doesn’t have the skills and the will to learn, so how can you make that happen?

The Ingredients (Passionate Technologists)

There is one kind of good web developer, the passionate one. In fact passion, or at least a keen interest, makes up for 80% of someone’s ability. Although, if you have a passionate non-technologist, lets say a DW user who loves to makes websites but doesn’t have much inclination to get into the nitty gritty detail of them, then that’s a problem. Such a person is still an asset but I would move them off development. If you have someone who isn’t passionate, that’s definitely a problem. It leads to the 2nd best is good enough here attitude. And it’s not a result of pragmatism but laziness. So, assuming you hire people who are keen, or who can at least be motivated, all you have to do is train them. Not a small thing!

We don’t need no education

Or, we can’t afford no staff training. Little irks me more than companies that don’t believe they have time to train their staff. Especially web agencies. I mean, the web is constantly changing, but must companies just make sure that when they hire someone they’re up to date and don’t bother providing for them much after that. Reasons include:

• Training and Conferences are too expensive.
• We’re so busy, we don’t have time for training.
• It’s our staffs responsibility to keep their skills up to date.
• If anything is too difficult then we get our guru to do it.

Now, if you’re a manager, don’t take it personally, but these are not reasons, they’re excuses. One by one:

Training and Conference are too expensive. I won’t deny, some training and conferences can be expensive. I wouldn’t want to pay for 10 people to go to @media myself. But it’s not really about cost, it’s about priorities. When you say something is too expensive, unless it’s that company lear-jet the MD keeps brining up, what is really meant is we don’t think it’s worth the cost.

The message your team gets is not, ‘Training and Conferences are too expensive’ but ‘we don’t think you’re worth spending that much money on’. You don’t have to send everyone to every conference, but in my opinion everyone should get the opportunity to attend at least one conference or training session a year. As you’re paying for it you can get them to give a brief write-up about what they learned to you. If you have a motivated team who are chuffed to be being sent to conferences then telling them to share what they’ve learned with other team members won’t be necessary.

We’re so busy, we don’t have time for training. This is also one of the better excuses. And again, sometimes yes, you can be too busy. But it’s a matter of fact that there are just times when you’re not so busy. Keep plenty of up to date books on the bookshelf for these times. Give everyone an hour a day (outside their lunchbreak) to pursue something related to their job function during work time and help facilitate their learning. Take an interest, ask what they’re learning, ask how it might help the company as a whole (but without making them justify everything all the time).

It’s our staffs responsibility to keep their skills up to date. If you really believe that, and you think being up to date is that critical, then it’s your responsibility to help facilitate that. Give your staff all the books they need and let them take them home if they want to.

If anything is too difficult then we get our guru to do it. Of course, no-one can afford to hire a full team of gurus, so having someone on board with a high level of technical competence is a good idea for medium to larger agencies. However, what this often turns into is a situation where people go along writing shoddy code, and whenever something doesn’t work the delegated guru has to fix it up, and because the base is already shoddy fixing it up is the right term. It also means that other team members don’t feel obliged to update their skills, both because there’s a guru on board who can fix their problems and because most companies don’t encourage learning enough.

Making it happen

This is all well and good, but you can’t just ditch Dreamweaver and become wonderful overnight. I’m not suggesting you do that. What I suggest is that you start small. Set aside a budget to go on training for a year. Ask people what conferences they’d like to attend, check out what books need updating (That book on HTML 3.2 can probably be retired now.) Then decide what works best for you and how you can use your budget to get the maximum training. Part of your budget should not just be monetary but time. How much time are you prepared to give to more your company forward. Do you think you can succeed just with new marketing pushes and by hiring another account manager, or do you believe that those doing the work creating best of breed websites is the only way to sustainable success?

I believe there is no reason why a company can’t be technologically transformed within a year if the staff are willing to learn. If you have people that moan about learning new stuff, then ask yourself if they deserve a place on your team. I have met some who learnt HTML and are simply too lazy to update. To those who are passionate about the web a change is better than a rest!

Resources

The following is a list of very helpful websites and books that I would suggest start as a basis for getting over the DW syndrome. Most stuff on this list is fairly basic and suitable for those starting to learn the core technologies of the web.

WD: Web Developer, M: Management

Sites

• 456 Berea Street (Look at the archives for invaluable straight forward advice on HTML. WD)
• Mezzoblue (The Site of One CSS Guru, more interesting in general to read than Eric Meyer too. WD)
• Vitamin (A new resources from Ryan Carson with loads of fantastic author and articles. WD)
• Creating Passionate Users (THE home of all things learning and passion. WD, M)
• Wisdump (Business as it pertains to the web. WD, M)

Books:

• Designing with Web Standards Jeffrey Zeldman (The original, soon to be released as a second edition. WD)
• Dom Scripting Jeremy Keith (One of the benefits of writing proper HTML is to be able to do jazz like this! WD)
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Simon Collison (With CSS, it’s possible WD)
• The Mythical Man-Month Frederick Brooks (And one for the management, although about software engineering a lot of this applies to large web projects. It shows some common mistakes managers make when a project gets delayed. M)

 

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