Lately, (since last one month), they took me off teaching to work on the school website content full time. I even have permission to work from home. So I blissfully spend hours prowling the net watching websites (in the name of work of course) 🙂 . (I love nothing better than to hang around here all day)
My specific assignment is to attempt to re-vamp a three year old site. Put in new content, change the look of it, bring out the Newsletter. I give them a blue-print in word, and then the designer would write the code for it.
This made me get back to WP and revive my interest in blogging.
Now throughout the process I noticed that:
1) I make random mistakes* to “see” how something works. Like activating Flickr on my a/c. I got it right only after the fifth try. Sure fire sign that am learning.
2) I try to read code, tramp around geeksites to get a hang of their language, so I can talk to my designer better AND faster. You do undertsand all of us work under a deadline here. Admissions are right round the bend in November and we want to be ready before folks hit the site.
3) I also learned to read code so I could edit the matter on the dummy before he uploads it to a server site.
4) Infact to make sense of what his problems are, what he needs and what I need to do to ensure maximum hits for our site I ended up learning about SEO, dummies, WYSIWYG, Dreamweaver and its interface etc.
So, like instead of saying, “I want, that, when people touch the bold lettered dates in our calendar they should not have to click, but instead as soon as they touch it with their mouse they should see the event planned for that day.” Phew! Was that long?!
If I could simply say, and I have learned it now {am shwoing off 🙂 } “I need a mouse-over on the dates, and maybe you could use AJAX”. Ten simple words and it’s done! One page taken care of.
Meaning? Well, to make way in this domain of web design, without stumbling too much, I had to get a hang of the grammar of Web Design. I did not become an expert, I don’t even claim to know the rules (how many native English speakers would know what to do when they are asked to use a transitive verb or join a sentence in appositon anyway? or Bangla speakers about the karak-bibhakti of their speech? ), but a very vague, very general idea of how it works and more importantly the ‘terms,’ call them jargon if you like, helps to get work done faster and effectively and to talk about it to the designer.
I saw that code is to web design like grammar is to language. One does much better if one knows both. It reaffirmed my faith that some grammar teaching at school is essential.
*If children are allowed to make those learning mistakes, and not monitored too tightly when they write compositions and stuff, they pick it up faster. More importantly knowing about terms and grammar enables them to talk about language and speeds up the learning process.
Runsingtwinkle 