Rodent Regatta

Meryl pointed to this book and it’s accompanying web site a few days ago. I missed it.

However, this is an important part of designing web sites. Lately, I’ve wondered what having close to 3000 entries in a weblog is doing to the speed of the site. Does MySQL behind the scenes help speed the site along? For what features or functions? Surely, the home page isn’t rendered any quicker, is it?

Along with this book, some other things are beginning to crystalize for me. Were I to ”fancy myself” being capable of web site design, some tools for the toolbox are now clear:

• Learn and know HTML and XHTML
• Learn a good text editor – I use NoteTab Pro
• Learn and know CSS – I’m clueless here, but TopStyle is the tool I’m using to learn CSS
• Learn Apache – it’s the most common web server around
• Learn PHP – you buy lots of futures when you design with this scripting capability behind the scenes
• Learn something about MySQL so that a web site can write forms data to a database
• Learn Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro for image manipulation
• Learn what the validators of CSS, HTML, XHTML and RSS do and how to apply them
• Identify a set of web sites, books and fellow designers from whom you can get help
• Obviously, learn web optimization

Unfortunately, there’s a missing ingredient. Having an eye for design is not something I’ve figured out how to study, learn and build. Either you are artistically adept or you’re not. Knowing the tools isn’t likely to bring this skill to the forefront.

That may be the single biggest obstacle to becoming a (profitable) web designer.