3 Skills I Perfected In 2009
Posted: 29 December 2009
2009 has been a great year. Behind all my achievements this year were a set of web-related skills I learnt as the year progressed. These have already helped me immensely, and I'm sure they will continue to be of help throughout my career. I've spelt out three of them below.PSD-To-XHTML/CSS
I can see you gasp! You must be wondering how I could even think of freelancing professionally without knowing this. Well, I do admit this skill is fairly basic to web development. I perfected it, that's all: it's not that I didn't know it (read the title of this post). Anyway, the truth is most of the so-called "top web companies" in Goa do not employ this technique. I guess they design directly in HTML, resulting in websites that look like they were made in the late 90s. Leaving Goa aside, I decided to do a little excercise. I typed "web design India" in Google and analysed the first 20 results. Shocking, if you don't live in India: 15 of the 20 "top web companies" still use tables for layout on their portfolios. So you can imagine the state of the hundreds of small web companies that have sprung up around every corner, and the thousands of clients who go to them to have their sites done. Of course, there are exceptions, though just a handful.Grid Systems (Grid 960)
I happened to chance across the 960 Grid System on Nettuts+, and I've been addicted to it since then. The grid has two big advantages: first it makes everything look structured, more so when there is a large amount of text, giving an organised appearance. Secondly, it has streamlined my development flow tremendously, and combined with skill #1, I have created working XHTML templates for visually complex sites in under 12 hours. And all those who opine that grids impede creativity (or make similar foolish assumptions) would benefit by reading this article.CMS Theming & Development (Textpattern)
Every web developer should know to theme and build sites with atleast one general-purpose CMS, for projects like portfolios and blogs. I chose Textpattern for reasons explained earlier. The first time I used it was for this site. By the second time (and one tiny plugin later), I was pretty much a pro with TXP. Wordpress is on my list in 2010.
So there you have it: these aren't all, just the most important. One other important skill was learning to deal with clients, which I still haven't perfected. Maybe in 2010. Till then, I would like to wish all my readers a Happy New Year 2010. May it bring you the peace and joy you desire, and may all your dreams come true.
