You know when I started designing web sites, blogs didn’t exist. My first web site was made with Microsoft Publisher and a little bit of HTML knowledge. Pretty well every web
site then took an age to download, even if I had had cable then, and had heaps of large graphics and lots of animated graphics. Text was big and the design was usually pretty poor.
By the time I bought dreamweaver, in preference to Front Page, thank God, I was ready to get my own domain name and host. Dreamweaver was pretty easy to learn and I thought, great, this is the best thing since sliced bread.
Then there were all those books in computer book stores about Java and PHP and I didn’t have a clue. But I did learn how to use javascripts not as a developer of them, but as a web designer.
Now we were suddenly going up to XHTML and CSS had arrived. It was all going too fast for me. I’ve managed both of those now, sort of, but we are almost back to a full circle with build a page, wikis, blogs, swickis all of which means that no-one has to know any code.
There’s debate all the time about which way the internet is going to go next. Was it going to be a content management system or was it going to be a blog?
I’ve used both and even had a forum at one time too. But it is only now that I have added WordPress to my site. And I like it.
With my web site, I tried DHTML menus so that every time I added a page I could update the menu in a flash. I’ve learnt Paint Shop pro, but not everything about Photoshop. I’ve made video tutorials that go to YouTube and I’ve made some podcasts. I love technology.
I could never afford much, so any spare cash went on the computer and we now have 2 networked. I’ve never done any IT study.
I find it almost impossible to keep up with all the changes, so the blog makes it easier to write a page and have it indexed almost immediately. Word Press has so many plugins to make it like a web site. There are not just posts here.
Should I change my whole site over to this blog or have it as a quick update of news to do with web design? Maybe not. I’d lose whatever ranking I have.
But which will do better? I have added google analytics to this blog so I can see my visitors. This blog is still only a month old so I don’t expect too many click throughs yet. I have a number of subscribers to my feed already though.
That’s another thing about blogs. A person can see all your posts in one click in their reader of RSS feeds. Subscriptions to web sites like I have seem to be slowing down. RSS is so much easier, although I may add an email subscription to my feed also.
I think too that most of the interesting stuff is appearing more on blogs than web sites. Of course the corporations and small businesses need their web sites. They don’t need to be changed that much, but whenever you go to google adsense or google analytics for example, do they care much about design? I don’t think so. They don’t need to.
Some blogs and web sites are really beautiful and I still like a good looking site.
Anyway, what do you think? What will be the future of the internet and please don’t say mobile phones.
Oh? About the eyes on the dog. I’ll get rid of the blue pupils for the next post and tell you how I did that as if you didn’t know!
