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February 2000 How I became a Webhead... So, while I was at Internet World in Toronto I caught up with a number of friends who aren't "in the industry", and they kept asking me the same things-- "how did you get into web stuff anyway, Lyz? And how can I start learning?" Well, believe you me, I'm just as surprised as anyone that I've wound up on a stable, and even lucrative career path. As far as I'm concerned, I always thought that at the age of 27, I'd still be either a grad student, or in some sort of starving-artist industry. In a way, I still wish I was, but that's another story altogether. However, when I was 23, at journalism school (learning that I didn't want to be a journalist, incidentally), I taught myself HTML. And that was the beginning of the end. I had always been a bit of a nethead, and I remember one night, a friend showed me how to view the HTML code of webpages. If you don't know how to do this, this is a great place to start understanding how HTML and the web works. How you do it is easy-- just use the "view" menu, on your browser, and choose "source". Then, your browser will pop up a nice page of HTML code for you to check out. Be sure to check off "word wrap" in Simple Text, or Notepad, or whatever you're using to look at the code. It makes a lot more sense that way. If you're a beginner, you might want to first view source on relatively simple pages, that don't have a lot of bells and whistles-- like this page, for example. Take a look at this sentence in the code-- can you tell how the <b> bold </b> tags dictate how the line looks in your browser? Anyway, after I figured out how to look at code, HTML didn't seem as intimidating anymore. So, I went out and invested $48.00 of my student loan into a fabulous book called Learn HTML in Seven Days by the author Laura Lemay. And, even though it took closer to a month, I did learn HTML pretty quickly. In fact, I spent most of the month of November 1996, balancing the Lemay book in my lap, while coding rudimentary HTML on my Mac PowerBook. If I was learning HTML now, I'd still go grab the Lemay book, (click here for a link to the book from indigo.ca) but I'd also check out Webmonkey, where there are some great beginner HTML tutorials. To make my first webpage, which was hosted at Mirror, just like this one is, I used SimpleText and Netscape. That's all. I wrote the code in Simple Text, and I previewed the pages in Netscape. And, by the time I went home for Xmas in 1996 I had a website! One thing that I really still believe in, as far as web programming goes, is that even though there are some advanced graphical tools to help you create pages out there, you need to understand the basics of HTML. Because HTML is so easy and descriptive, it's pretty simple to figure out. And when you've got the fundamental knowledge, and understand the framework of webpages, it's easy to move on and use something more sophisticated. I discovered Macromedia's Dreamweaver web authoring tool in January of 1998, and I must confess, that I now do 90% of my webstuff with Dreamweaver instead of handcoding. In fact, I'm using it right now. Dreamweaver is the best of the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editors out there, and, in my professional opinion, the only one worth bothering with. You've got to be careful with WYSIWYG editors though-- a lot of them tend to add proprietary code that messes up your clean HTML and makes it hard for certain browsers to parse what you've written. I'm specifically thinking here of the evil that is Microsoft FrontPage. Many people use this application because it's cheap and has a familiar Microsoft interface, but please, please, please avoid it at all costs. Pages written in FrontPage are clogged up with all sorts of yucchy proprietary code and have the tendency to crash non-IE browsers. If you're serious about web development, download the free trial of Dreamweaver from Macromedia and start playing. It's well worth the investment. Once you've gotten a handle on HTML and have messed around with Dreamweaver for a bit, you might as well put a site together. There's a lot you can do while keeping your pages simple and your code elegant. Being at the conference last week reminded me how much I do enjoy this industry, even if sometimes it seems that everything's buried in hype. Though the web grows every day, it still remains this unique democratic medium...offering a voice to every wing-nut out there...(myself included.) And if an artsy-fartsy chick who dropped out of high school math can teach herself to program, I bet you can too. |
