What I really think of Web Design.

Web Design
I'll be honest with you, when I first heard that I would be doing web design for this course, I was absolutely dreading it. From the moment those words came out of my teachers mouth all those years ago in years 8, I know my world had officially ended and the gates of hell had opened up.

And I had been right to suspect that.

Even though we were using a simple program that you just drag and drop things into a free space, I just couldn't get my head around it, I can telly you, there has never been a more happier time for me in my life, when that topic was done and I could go about my day as if it never existed, ready to never see the green monster in my closet ever again.

Oh, how wrong I was.

I had no idea it would come back to haunt me, 7 years later, about two weeks ago. I truly felt myself weep on the inside when my teacher said those words that would thrust me into the bell of beast, with a nothing but a twig to defend myself with.

But I would not give up, I would beat the Titan in the room even if it took me days of head banging to accomplish it and twenty or so times to call the teacher every time he finally stops talking.

And as expected when I set my eyes on my first bit of coding, it felt like the world was rotating around me once more, like all those years ago, I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. The most i've ever seen of coding was when I accidentally pressed 'Embed' on a Youtube video.

So it was with grim determination that I mentally rolled up my sleeves and stared long and hard at the monster that I was about to face.

The monster called Sublime.

https://realpython.com/blog/python/setting-up-sublime-text-3-for-full-stack-python-development/

And what a monster it was.

I, like many other's, haven grown with the misguided notion that you can teach yourself anything as long as took time out of day, sat down and goggled infomation or tutorials on that particular subject.

So let me tell you this now, goggling Sublime tutorials was one of the worst mistakes I have ever done in my life, I just felt like pulling my hair out and screaming at the screen. "ENGLISH! DO YOU SPEAK IT!?"

How do you input a simple audio? I typed it into the search engine just like everybody else.

Only to find myself looking at the professional coding language from people who clearly don't know how to teach coding to simple beginners.

Maybe looking on Youtube would help me find the light in the darkness?

Nope.

I am 100% certain that it would have worked, if not for the sound socket for the PC, hadn't decided to completely ignore my headphone jack and decided to blast, the sound through it's tiny hole into the very classroom. It is my greatest shame having people find out I'm looking up Youtube tutorial when our teacher just explained to us the exact same thing.

Honestly, I felt like I landed in a foreign country, where everybody could speak the language except for me, I felt like a deer caught in headlights.

But it wasn't all bad.

By some miraculous miracle, which I will truly thank god for, something went through.

I felt like getting up and doing a little jig in the middle of the classroom, when I realised I know how to divide my window, into to HTML and CSS.

From what I could gather, HTML is all the things you want to input into your website, such as video, audio and text, or as I liked to call 'raws', files that have yet to be edited in any way.

CSS is the editing of whatever you inputed into HTML, such as, if you want to taint a picture, scale or even appoint a position of where you want it to be on the website.

And the miracles didn't stop coming, because I suddenly understood, open and closed brackets {}, I didn't understand what on earth a 'class' or any coding terms, because for some reason whenever I hear that word I'm suddenly remembering my happy days playing one of the Dragon Quest gave on my old nintendo.

I felt like an idiot, having the teacher explain it to me over and over again and still having to look at him as if he was from another planet.

The beast just refuses to go down, until somebody, perhaps a knight in shining armour, finally speaks a language that I can understand.

And than we were introduced to a website called Github, from what I can remember the teacher telling the class, what makes the website so special, is that it keeps the old previous version of any file you update, which would have saved me from so many passed mistakes.

I would have been on my knees bowing down to the godly program if not for it's complexity, the very way the teacher explained how to operate the site, was like he was giving us an advance course on rocket science, looking around the room, I found I wasn't the only who thought so too.

Behance took a couple of minutes to get used but Github was like a whole different animal, it was comparing a cat to a lion, it was far superior in certain aspects but if you look closely you would actually see the raging battle from within.

I added Github as my second monster that I had to defeat.

I've always been a very creative type of person, in those seconds were whatever the teacher said, went out through the other ear, I thought how amazing it would be to have my own animated background, in the background of my website.

So I went to work in creating assets in Adobe Photoshop and imputing them layer by layer in AdobeAffects. I made all the layers 3D and than inputed a 3D camera and made it look like they were all inside a 3D space.

I was pretty proud of my accomplishment and thought it would surely impressed my teacher.

That is until the teacher dropped a bomb over my head.

Nothing but .MP4 files work in sublime, I found out too late that .MP4 doesn't exist in Affect effects, all my hard work went down the drain in that moment.

You can imagine how dismayed I was.

I had no choice but to follow the crowd and do what every body else was doing, even though I had my own ideas of what would make me stand out, too bad it didn't work.

However I'm getting too negative and I need to focus on some positives, my experience with Sublime had a shocking effect on me.

I didn't realise it but early this afternoon, when I was writing a new post for my blog, I found myself switching to 'HTML' and managed to input a photo album and goggle maps in the post. I was astounded by this.

It made hope bloom in my heart, I wasn't completely useless on this subject and maybe one day, I could proudly call myself decent because I have to be honest with myself, I know my website isn't the best, I just have to look to my right to find, a web genius, I managed to do the bare minimum to get myself that pass and even that was like walking up a flight or stairs at the age of 100+.   

To be honest, I would have been more happier to see this project end and celebrate with the biggest box of Maryland chicken I can find, but you always have to do what you don't want to do, even as a future animator, I know that many people have skills in web design even though they never thought of doing it as their primary income, however it does came in handy for making some side along cash.

And it looks more impressive on your CV.

Even if it takes me years to accomplish, one day I hope to defeat the beast that has plagued ever since that faithful day in year 8 and say to myself, coding is like air.

Coding is something that would help with your survival however nobody can deny, it's a double edge sword.