Learning on the Web

Keeping abreast of the changes on the interwebs is a never ending battle, most days you feel as if you’re falling behind.

However, one simple way to tell if you’re learning something new is to ask yourself - if I had to do a project over again, what would I change?

Keeping abreast of the changes on the interwebs is a never ending battle—most days you feel as if you’re falling behind.

Lately I’ve had the experience of “duplicating” a website I built for a client six months ago to use on another new website. I thought my first effort was pretty slick - using a CSS grid system (BlueTrip, to be precise). The next time around, I still used BlueTrip (mostly because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel) but I changed the DTD to html5 and used modernizer to implement some nice CSS3 tricks.

No, the site is not “responsive”, at least not yet. My goal is to make BlueTrip responsive, much like the 1140 grid system is. But nonetheless, there’s a nice fallback for IE6/7. Something I don’t have to worry about using another system.

If you’re aware of developments in the field of web design/development, you know that things move at the speed of light, and most of the time you’re left in the dark. But don’t give up - keep learning/reading/posting. The vast majority of us aren’t like Ethan Marcotte or Jonathan Snook. We’d like to pretend we are, but we aren’t. So we trudge on. And that is good enough.

Posted by Jesse on 06/09 at 03:02 AM