Some Thoughts on Web Design

If you had told me six months ago that by November I would have coded a website by hand, I would told you that was crazy. Web design? Me? I'm not so sure about that.

But, strangely enough, that is the case. Web design turned out to be a required course for my program, so I enrolled this quarter, and as of a few days ago, I have actually coded a website by hand.

I know that in today's internet-driven society, that isn't much of a feat. There are millions of people who beat me to it. But despite that, I am proud of it. It isn't super cool or fancy, and it doesn't have a bunch of neat features, but it works, and I made it do that. And if you ask me, that's still pretty cool.

In the beginning, I felt like one of the most clueless people in the course. I had no idea what the heck any of those acronyms that people kept throwing around meant (CSS, W3C, etc.) and I was intimidated by all that had to do with web design. However, once I got past my confusion and fear and forced myself to jump off the high dive, I actually picked it up fairly quickly. I'm not claiming to know or understand every bit of HTML and CSS (because I certainly don't!), but I think I've come very far in the past couple of weeks.

I'm also enjoying the fact that it's something new. I haven't done much academic work in the past few years aside from the familiar routine of read, research, and write a paper. It's sort of nice to do something different, and something that's challenging in a new way.

I don't know if I'll ever need to apply these skills in my professional life, but being forced to acquire them has been a rewarding experience. It's always good to get out of your comfort zone, and if nothing else, at least my blog looks a little better because of it. ;-)