on 5 August 2005Creating a website used to be so simple. With two lines of code you could make a grey background, print your name on it in big black letters, and win an award from Jakob Nielsen. Brilliant. Nowadays, of course, you’d be ridiculed by 99.9% of the web-using population, while the rest tried to figure out what to do about the little message that said Windows XP had blocked access to this site because it might contain a virus.
It must be the lingering aura of easy-peasy-pimpsiness that explains why clients can never grasp that a designer might not do web design. When you pitch for their print communications, they don’t come back and ask if you can give them some ideas for their bathroom. But they’ll quite cheerfully say, ‘Loved the brochure roughs. We’ve also got this website…’ Then they look all crestfallen when you offer to recommend a web specialist, as if you’d said you didn’t really fancy them but your mate might.
Do these people expect the same omnicompetence from every professional? ‘No fillings today, Mrs Smith, but I couldn’t help noticing that arrhythmia. Have a lie down there and we’ll do a triple bypass. By the way, I’d go with the Philippe Starck sanitaryware.’
Of course, your stupidest client is always yourself. My website, designed by me, consists of a message apologising for the lack of a website*, and even that probably isn’t W3C-compliant.
Last week, after getting one too many of those ‘Looked on your website, but…’ emails, I decided Something Must Be Done, and clicked the scary blue starfish that is Adobe GoLive CS2. Then I clicked Tutorials. Christ, I’ll be reading manuals next. (For younger readers: a manual used to be a kind of book that came with software. Like a PDF, but made of paper and with an index where the page numbers matched the actual pages.)
Clicking Tutorials took me to a help page called Tutorials, which was inside a folder called Tutorials, which in turn was the only item inside a folder called Tutorials. Disappointingly, there were no folders labelled ‘Pages that are in this folder’ or ‘Folders named after the folders that contain them’, so it seems Adobe’s joke department ran out of time before finishing its homage to Jorge Luis Borges. Maybe in CS3, or CSI: Miami, or whatever they call the next version.†
Fortunately, their sense of humour had plenty of other outlets. I’d assumed that, when you ran a program dedicated to creating websites, it would invite you to create a website. In fact, you have to tell it you want to create a website, as opposed to a kitchen garden, perhaps, or a charitable organisation protesting the paternalist agenda of the Nordic states in regulating indigenous reindeer herders.
Telling it this involves stepping through a dozen options in a Site Creation Wizard, which then congratulates itself: ‘That’s all there is to creating a new site!’ Oh, and there was me thinking I still had to prove the Riemann hypothesis and carry a rare purple flower to the top of the mountain.
Then things get worse. It’s no good just drawing a diagram; you have to attach the diagram to a site. Uh? To you and me, it might seem obvious that, if you’re in a web design program, and you’re making a diagram showing pages linked together, then the diagram probably represents the pages in your website. I mean, let’s just say the Adobe people had built in such an assumption. How wrong could that have been? Can you really imagine slapping your forehead at GoLive’s infernal arrogance? ‘But you were making a diagram of little pages – I just thought…’ ‘Oh, you just thought, did you? That’s exactly your trouble, my lad. You don’t think, do you? Here I am trying to plan my ant farm, and you’ve gone and converted the whole thing into a website! What do I look like, Joshua bloody Davis? Eh? Eh?’
I did wonder if it was GoLive’s fault or if it was just me. I asked a friend who does web design, and he laughed. Then he said, ‘Try Dreamweaver.’ Then, for some reason, he laughed a lot more.
To cut a long story short, my website still has a message apologising for the lack of a website. I’ve come to realise, though, that this is really a good thing. After all, if anybody asks, not only can I tell them I don’t do web design – I can prove it.
Adam Banks grew up with 8-bit microcomputers and gets light-headed if forced to contemplate the existence of a number greater than 255.
*Not now, obviously. This was in 2005. Check the date. See?
†They just called it CS3. Some people have no imagination.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper