World Wide Woes

If my reckoning is correct, which would be the first time I’ve done anything right all day, then the Saipan Tribune’s web presence is near the decade milestone now. It’s bad form to vomit up trite phrases like “time sure flies,” but, well, darn, time sure flies.

The Internet is up there with sand and sunshine on the “count yer blessings” list in the CNMI. That’s for good reason, of course, but I’ll admit that web page writing, in particular, has zoomed way ahead of me, and I feel like I’m on the sidelines. Of course, I didn’t have anything to do with the Tribune’s web presence; the web pros handled that.

But, still, am I the only one who is totally mystified by things like, say, CSS? Or Flash? Or PHP? Or JavaScript? Or Java applets? And surely a lot of other stuff that I’d be scared of, or confused by, if I even knew it existed?

Can we bring back the mid-1990s please? Web authorizing wasn’t the sole domain of “professionals” back then. Average slobs like me could hand code basic HTML, put up a basic page which sufficed for our purposes, and that was the end of it.

So in the spirit of true atavism, sloth, and recalcitrance, my humble personal web site hasn’t changed much in years. Once a month or so I get a missive asking if I’d like a pro to overhaul it for me. Well, thanks, but no. It suits its purpose just fine. After all, the line between dorky and retro is a fine one.

As cozy as that homemade cyber-hearth is, though, I wound up in the maw of needing to get a commercial web site built.

Yikes!

Now that’s a true can of worms. A few days into the endeavor, and I’ve made no progress at all.

For example, the CSS (that’s Cascading Style Sheets, should you care, which you probably shouldn’t, unless you want a cascading migraine) gig has really got a spike into brain. I just read three chapters in three different books on CSS. It’s all the same formula: They sing its praises, then clearly illustrate how not to use it, then close with warnings about its pitfalls. I’m lost.

Before someone snidely tells me to just hire a web designer, I’ll note that I tried to do just that. I wound up blowing two hours looking at portfolios of web sites that all said as I tried to open them, “…LOADING…8 percent….LOADING…9 percent….CLICK HERE TO SKIP INTRO.”

No thanks. Oh well, no problem, I thought, I’ll just brush up on modern web authoring stuff before lunch time, and then after dinner I’ll whip out a real gem of a page.

Yeah, right. Click here to skip lunch. And dinner. And Tuesday. And October. And 2008, from the looks of things.

I’ll forge into just about anything, head first, to figure it out for myself, but I think this time around I have to admit defeat.

I know at least a couple of dozen people in the exact same situation. They’re all small business owners. Oddly enough, the barriers to web site entry seem higher, not lower, than they did a dozen years ago, when a very simple site would keep everybody happy. I don’t know if standards for acceptable-looking sites are any better now, but they’re certainly more extravagant.

There are certainly many excellent web authors out there, of course, since the entire world is built around web sites. The problems arise from an inefficient market; the buyers, and the sellers, just can’t find each other, at least in many cases that I’ve seen. You’d think it would be a commodity, and maybe it is and I’m just too stupid to know that end of the industry, but from what I see, it’s often a word of mouth thing.

My solution in this case is simple: I appointed one of my co-workers to get this task done. The monkey is off my back, and I can go back to my really important duties, like monitoring the tread wear on my pickup truck tires.

Here’s a better solution: Bring back 1994. That seems to be the point in history where I got off the technology bus, and I never caught another one.

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