It seems like forever ago…starting out learning from an older teenager I worked with at my first job. He taught me much of the basics of HTML, using tags, what the markup looked like for images and links, etc.
He told me he knew I wouldn’t take his word for it, but the best editor for websites was Notepad.
And following in his footsteps, I began with Notepad. I did some basic, simple websites: creating links, placing images, playing with tables and using an occasional unordered list or two.
Yet when I began learning HTML and simple web developing in my high school, my first class used only HTML Kit. It was a great program and it did everything all the other programs did, yet it helped along the way with deciding with elements to use and how to properly mark them up.
As a student and aspiring designer, I looked at the websites I used on a daily basis (Google, Yahoo!, Educational Sites) and I wondered how those websites looked so much better than my creations.
That’s when I discovered the likes of Dreamweaver in my intermediate web development class. I fell in love at first site. It did everything; with the preview view, you could design WYSIWYG and forget about all that coding gibberish. It was great…I was on my way to being a real web designer. (Foreshadowing: It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be)
After a few years of using Dreamweaver, not coding at all, nearly forgetting all of my HTML knowledge, I naturally discovered and began using Fireworks. It was great because I could design everything in there, export it for the web and it automated all of the code. The problem was that when it had an error and things didn’t look right, fixing the problem was hard as hell.
Over the past two years, after discovering Web Standards through DWWS, I have grown fond of the beautiful combination of CSS and (x)HTML. After picking up a copy of BBEdit, I began truly feeling like I was getting somewhere with my work. For once, my websites loaded faster and my code was tidy. And I was, once again, back to editing everything by hand. Today, I truly feel a sense of pride in my work that has never been felt before.
So, in short, you could say my mentor was right. While I have since moved over to a Mac platform, he really did have the right idea. It seems that everybody who begins a career or hobby in web design goes from marking up all their HTML by hand in order to learn, then turning to Dreamweaver or GoLive to do their work for them, and then back around to discovering web standards and using programs such as BBEdit or TextMate.
The only warning I can give to designers just now discovering the beauty of web standards is don’t get overly caught up in our site validating because it’s so much more than that. It’s about creating rich user experiences in every site you design; making your site accessible by any human using any browser (besides IE, of course) and fully separating the content from the presentation.
Happy designing.