So you want to be a web designer

You Want to Be…But You’re Not

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”

Zig Ziglar

I Know What I Want To Be Now

If you want it, you must try it. If you try it, you might like it. If you like it, you will keep on doing it. If you keep on doing it, you will become an expert. The first step is to try it. Ever wanted to do something and started, hit a bump, and then stopped? Yeah, me too.

I remember when I first saw raw code. It freaked me out. Still does from time to time. And mind you, I love to code. At first glance it seemed like Greek to me. It was incomprehensible. It was English, but funky English – like Pig Latin. From my first interaction with a computer, I had a urge to see behind the screen. How does this work. I had to find out. The search for an answer brought me to raw code. My first attempt and Greek bumped my head – hard. It took almost 15 years before I got back to looking at, let alone understanding code. Chicken…

Turns out code is not Greek. It’s a lot of lines of text with a bunch of symbols. I comprehend it. In early 2012 I was in the middle of a job hunt. Then it hit me. I saw the contracting secretarial market. Being a secretary could no longer be my only source of employment. 70% of my job search time was allocated to searching for a job. While 30% was allotted to researching non-administrative jobs. Not just any job; only those I might like to do. I took a ton of online “job IQ test”. Not one of them ever being helpful. Turns out 30% was enough time. I discovered W3School. And the rest was history. Or history in the making at any rate.

I Know What I Want To Be Now

It took some trail and err to narrow down my career path. I tried a few things. Through trying I had found a vocation that stuck. First try was interior decorating. I liked it. Clients drove me mad. No fit there. Then I tried offering my administrative services virtually. I have to confess I dig being a secy. However, after ditching interior decorating, I started learning how to code. I learned so much, I built my own website and then some.

While building the site, I found I out what wanted to be. I am a web designer. A web designer who still works as an admin. Coding took over. Now I just want to be a web (and a UX) designer. Now a try is tame compared to the actual pursuant of a dream. Yet, you must start somewhere. My mother use to say, “nothing beats a blank but a try”. If you are at the crossroad of a career change. Try something.

Even if it’s not a dream, just a fancy; try it. No first bump and quit. Try it until you either lose or feed your desire to do it. Your first blush is an effort. Trust me on that. You have no idea what you are getting yourself into. We make choices based on what we like. Nonetheless, everything has a plus and minus. Do not let a minus be the deciding factor. Give it a good ole college try. Then dump it if it’s not a fit. Now go and beat a blank with a try.

Secy To Web Designer

Blog It With A Post

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Thomas Edison

The plan was to post regularly on this blog. I started back in June 2020. You do the math. Won’t be hard there are a total of 2 post. Good Lord, my first post is a bunch of mumbo jumbo. It’s still up and there are no plans to take it down. I’d like to save you from reading it with a quick summary.

“For over 20 years I’ve earned my living as a legal secretary. My new career path is web/UX designer. It’s a path I’ve been on since 2013 and will be blogging about.”

We Do Re-Do

Today is the re-start of the June start. Time to get back to blogging my career transition, even if it kills me. My first foray into blogging was a flop. This new attempt doesn’t have to be. I’ve come up with a few ground rules. Now I detest the 5 of this and 2 of that blog posts. You know the ones, where these are the 10 best or the 10 greatest or the top 10 don’t dos. It’s puzzling how one narrows a list of don’ts down to 10?

I guess I’ve lived so long, I can tell you, if your “don’t do list” is shorter than your ”do do list”, you’re doing it wrong. However, that’s a topic for a future post. Which winds me back to where I need to be – ground rules. Regardless of my aversion to list, the rules are being listed. However, this isn’t my opinion on the greatest, tops or best way to build a blog. This is my list. To keep me on track. I’m sharing it with you. Creating accountability for myself. Here goes it.

The Non-List List

  • Proof read, proof read again, read out loud – post.
  • Be concise.
  • Be consistent (2 post per week).
  • Stay on topic.
  • It’s my blog. I can make you cry if I want to.

It’s a short list. No need to write a handbook. Can I promise you 2 post every week? No. Will every post be mistake free. Don’t kid yourself. Will I post hurtful, mean spirited post to make folks cry? No. However, I plan on being honest and the truth hurts sometimes. If you get hurt, it’s not intentional. Besides, you are welcome to leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you. Here’s to new beginnings.

Be Prepared

I Saw It Coming and Prepared

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

G.K. Chesterton

I loved being a secretary. Not sure why, but I loved it. I say “loved” not because I no longer love it. I say loved because to be a secretary is no more. I didn’t stop being a secretary; the needs for a secretary stop being. Or at the very least dwindled done to bare nothingness. For at least 10 years, I’ve spent more time searching and engaging with the internet than performing work – at work. Spending 30 of the 35 weekly working hours searching the internet, while at work, does not make for a promising future. I had to ask myself, how long until they stop paying me (handsomely) for my expert internet abilities and mushy secretarial skills? See working the internet damaged my secretarial skills. It had to be about 2009 when I said to myself, “self, you are on a dead-end path, working with a diminished kill set, inside a dying profession”.

Praise God for MOOCs. My love of all things computers started when I was about 19 years old. I sat at one that looked like a spaceship. Everything was connected, from the seat to the monitor. I was in heaven. Just playing around. Made me run out and buy an Apple computer. Which also looked just like a spaceship. Computer design didn’t seem to be a priority back in the day. The computer was clunky and the monitor text color was an ugly green. The printer was separate, but it only printed in dot pixels. I think that’s what they called it. All the letters were formed with dots. Believe you me, even with those faults, you couldn’t tell me nothing. I was high tech and in college. That monster clunker produced a few semesters worth of college newsletters. The Apple III came in two pieces and was heavy – at least 75 pounds. The printer was a stand alone.

I did everything on my first computer. Saved it all to floppy disk as well. At the office we were still using an IBM Selectric typewriter, which was high technology. Those machines were smooth as butter. Every secretary’s desk had an IBM Selectric. There was only one computer in the office. Do I need to say it? It looked like the spaceship. There’s was only one person that operated it. It was used, similar to my own personal use, for reports, accounting, etc. You’d think I would have saw the death coming then. I didn’t. It just seemed like upgrades. Chango presto, before you knew it, PCs were hogging up space on every desk. The techno progress began slowly. Then time started to speed up a bit after Microsoft came out with their version of the desktop. This sucker didn’t have ugly green letters and used something called windows. Loved it. Took me 3 hours to figure out how to use the windows. There were lots of upgrades to the systems as well. Things we all were asking for. We got themes for the monitor, tables, the ability to mark documents for bibliographies, tables of content, etc. Fonts, colors, spacing and formatting were like cooking with gas. It was right around this time, that my job duties started to shrink. Again it was slow mo. You would hardly notice the choke hold of death. No this was more like a chip here and a chip chip there. Soon monitors shrank, then got big again. We had CPUs that were flat then we got standing up towers. On and on it went; we even went ergo (i.e., ergo keyboards). By this time, there was no faking the funk. I barely touched a piece of paper let alone typed something to print on one.

So we took the slow burn route. Skills turning to mush and the internet causing my duties to dwindle. It got so bad all I did was print out spreadsheets and answer the phone. I whittled away the lull in my day by learning how to use Excel, PowerPoint and, at home, Access. I was a whiz at Word. There was still work to be done and it did fill up at least 3 – 5 hours of the working day. And then the next wave hit. Folks start to retire. Turned out newbies (their replacments) could type and they grew up using computers so they needed even less of my assistance. Then came the real blow (or first nail in the coffin) – 2008. We crashed hard back then. Not sure if folks remember. Now I’m told we had a recovery. I was fortunate and keep my job throughout, but I remain uconvenienced that we ever recovered. For one thing, we started printing money with nothing to back it up with. The worth of the dollar has steadily went down. It started to fall then. And don’t go writing me about Fort Knox. There’s no gold in Fort Knox. Let that go. It’ll be better for you in the long run. As the “Crash of 2008” went, so did my employment prospects. I lost a job and got a job. The new job paid $20K less. Some recovery that was. About the only thing that got recovered was $20K from my pay.

I spent four years searching the internet. I had to find something I could do. Content no more with just sitting and turning to mush, I found Courser.org in 2013. I didn’t study web development there, but it led me to other online learning sources. Those learning sources turned out to be free, as Coursera was at the time. And many of them were devoted to teaching web development solely. Now that was news to me and good news at that. So my now 5 – 6 hour lulls were filled learning how to code. Long before “learn how to code” became a catch phrase bandied at laid-off workers in dying professions. The internet appears to be the only place you see real measurable growth. Everything else seems stagnit. If you do have a business it better have a connect to the internet. Everybody in the whole wide wide world of webs should have a webpage. Or at the very least, a profile on LinkedIn. And now we’re at COVID-19. The last nail in the coffin of so many professions. Thank God I learned how to code and I am “Loving It”.

The slow mo route could have cost me. Not that I thought I’d ever earn my living from the web development skills I was learning. My plan was to retire from being a legal secretary. Yet, once we all got settled into 2009, I knew the wheels had come off the wagon. There was no going back. We crossed the Rubicon. Had I not learned how to code, I’d be stuck in the middle of the Rubicon. I got across. Am I where I wanted to be today? No. Nevertheless, I was more prepared than I knew. Since 2013 I’ve been slaving away at building some sort of independent income. Now I’m focused on building a new career. With a bit of business on the side. You need to have an independent source of income. This is not your father’s economy any more. I’ve had some successes. I’ve made a few extra dollars here and there. And I did what I thought would make me a business. Didn’t work so it hasn’t happened. I’m not worst for it. I’m better for it. I made tons of mistakes. However, said mistakes have been awesome opportunities for learning and growing.

I’m a web designer now. So what no one’s hired me full-time – yet. So what all of my live sites were done for free and became hard to finish with flaky website owners and my own inexperience. That’s a real hard lesson I learned. Don’t do things for free. No one will take you seriously. Even if you were not prepared for this “new normal” (yeah like stuff’s really normal right now) there’s still hope. You once loved something and never made it a project. Now’s the time to dust it off and start a fresh. Make it a project – found out about it. The world has not ended. Keep going. Find your niche and sleep, eat and breathe it. It will pay off.

Bloggings – A Beginning

“Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.”

Charles Spurgeon

It was my intention to start this blog with a post focused on how I started this journey from legal assistant to web designer. Seems a logical place to start, but I never could get “started”. In fact as logical as it seems to start in the beginning, my real beginning is happening now. Which is kind of in the middle. It’s where the meats at. It’s where the lessons learned finally have value. It’s where all the flipping and flopping (and yes, failures) pay off. Well it at least is where I feel most comfortable starting this Blog.

Over time, the story of my journey will come out. You will see it revealed post by post as I impart the lessons I’ve learned. Of course, my main focus will be on web design/development. If there’s anything I can tell you it’s that the process of becoming a web design/development has taught me lots about myself and life. You truly get out what you put in. You misspell (and I’m a terrible speller) a tag, forget a semi-colon, don’t close a tag or any combination of typing error and the page will break. There no way to count the number of hours I’ve spent trying to figure out what was wrong in my code. Why my page was breaking after the first paragraph. In the end, only to find I had made the mistake of not closing a tag.

Learning how to code has caused me to face the reality that I had become sloppy and complacent. I was so up my own butt, I barely used spell check. Me the chick that can’t spell worth a dime. Spell check should forever be like my best friend. Being a chronic miss-speller is a hard habit to break. However, if I’m going to code (and that’s exactly what I’m going to do) I must become a better speller. Or at any rate, an eagle eyed master proofreading editor. I now check my work thrice. And I should probably triple up on that number of checks.

Bad spelling hasn’t been my only discovery. I tend to speed through everything. As if there’s no tomorrow (which could actually be true – that there be no tomorrow). Yet that’s no excuse to speed through work assignments. Some how I’ve picked up the impression that speed matters. This particular bad habit wasn’t developed in a vacuum. Not that I’m going to waste space expanding on it’s origins here. Still it’s an issue with real detrimental consquences. Speed does matter. It just doesn’t matter over accuracy. Multitudes of mistakes have been committed simply because I’ve sped through task just in case there is no tomorrow. I really don’t think I need to worry much about there being no tomorrow. If I wake up it’s to produce high quality work and enjoy life. If there is no tomorrow, well nothng matters. Think about it, I’m gone – dead. Dead men really don’t wear plaid. If your dead, speed is moot.

Which brings me to the journey so far. I’ve come to a place where I can be totally honest with myself. I not only realize I make mistake, sometimes sloppy mistakes, but that failing is not a bug but a feature. You can’t truly know you love something until you fail at it. Falling flat, picking yourself up and continuing to plug away will get you a win. Be kind and gentle to yourself. Take it step by step. It’s your choice. You can choose to hope around like a rabbit. Going nowhere fast and being destracted 24/7. Or you can go slow and steady. Making progress and winning races like a turtle. Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself. The turtle wins the race, baby.