Three Books to Help Build A Better Internet

You know you’ve taken leave of absence of your senses when you let a teenage son designs a “basic” web page for your business!

But the real insult is when they figure they can whip one up in five seconds! People, here this now: “Designing a website is not a five-second thing.“

Getting someone’s teenage son to “put together a website” is like building a working model of a NASA space station with bunch of straws and plasticine. You could make it — but how effective would it be?

Could it sustain life, survive being inundated with a multitude of traffic, would Google-earth see it? Would its inner-workings be modifiable by someone other than the designer? Could more data be added to its database without crashing into the earth below?

That being said, yes, your teenager could design a website. But the people who continue to improve the internet (particularly Zeldman, Meyer1, Goto & Cotler, Holzschlag and Meyer2) would cringe at what might they have spent so much time and effort to remove from the internet.

To build any type of website, your child should first read these books:

1. Web ReDesign 2.0 – Workflow That Works
2. 250 HTML & Web Design Secrets
3. Designing with Web Standards

These are only the beginning! Many books have been written since these, but these serve as a great grounding.

But wait, there is much more. You’ll notice I have not mentioned what programs to use: This depends on what language you choose to go with.

Some people hand-code with MS Notepad, some purchase Dreamweaver (whereas the Microsoft users continue to abuse the internet with FrontPage), others again use specialised software – and database managers use a full-blow CMS.

Your teenager will probably want to start ‘playing’ straight away, avoiding the learning because it reminds them too much of their high-school years. Sad, but true: Learning is a part of life. Enjoy learning the hard stuff to make the work a lot easier.