One of the tough things about being a web designer (in case you don’t know, I’m a grad student who does web design and programming on the side to pay the bills) is that once you get comfortable with a certain technology, you find that it has become outdated. And you have no choice but to keep up, especially if you teach web design, as I do–you don’t want to instruct students in methods that are already out of date. But it’s tough to force yourself to discard familiar ways of doing things and to plunge, once again, into a new sea of knowledge; you know that you’re likely to wind up on the sand, coughing out water and gasping for air, before you learn how to float.
I’m in the midst of a such a shake-up right now. I’m trying to learn how to use CSS positioning, instead of tables and spacer gifs, to lay out my pages. I love formatting text and images with CSS, but laying out pages with it makes me a little anxious. Once I get the hang of it, though, I’m looking forward to getting rid of the default Kubrick template that I’ve been using for this blog and designing a new interface.
In case anyone else out there is struggling with the same issues, I wanted to pass on some links that are making this transition a little easier. Thanks to my friend Zach of Cast Iron Coding for many of these links.
I’d love to hear from other people who have moved from table-based layout to CSS positioning. And if you have other useful links, please pass them on in the comments.
Also, I know that these kinds of learning experiences are not limited to web design–what was the hardest new technology you ever had to learn to do for your job, and how did you get through the experience?
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