Gigs

1. Wile away the best years of your life building a weblog and filling it with useful, interesting, relevant, topical, engaging content every day.
2. ???
3. Profit!

—Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into XML

So true. Recent grumblings regarding my blog idleness are the result of this simple formula. Back when I was a student (and had free time), I ranted and raved about Pagerank and accessibility and usability. One would think that such histrionics would send our readership screaming from their bookmarks. On the contrary, some people read that and actually came under the impression that I knew what I was talking about, so I’ve been able to stack up a few web design and consulting gigs to pull in some extra Benjamins. I’ve found spending my free time building things I enjoy for profit to be a lot better than wiling my life away in front of the television. But then, aparently anything would be a lot better than wiling my life away in front of the television.

No announcements just yet, but the projects I’ve been involved in have been a lot of fun. For one project, the client came to me with a design already in mind. This turned out to be remarkably challenging because a number of his design influences came from Flash-based sites. Flash always reminds me of this part in Steve Krug‘s web usability book, Don’t Make Me Think. In it, Steve is trying to convey to the reader the typical internal power struggle over the corporate home page at Generic Widget Company. He very cleverly–everything about this book is very clever, actually–sketches little thumbnails of each stakeholders’ impression of the ideal website. The marketing guy envisions columns of banner ads, the programming guy envisions an ugly (but very functional) form, the graphic design guy envisions a très minimaliste aesthetic wonder. But all the CEO envisions is one thing: “Pizzazz!!!”

Flash, with all of it’s swoopy eye-candy appeal, is pizzazz. But sensible site architecture will always, always, always trump the pizzazz factor. Sooner or later, someone will have to make a change to the site. Or design fads will change. Or Marketing will complain that the site isn’t drumming up enough business. Technologies built using web standards enable clients to cope with change; Flash does not. Ultimately, though, it’s The Google Argument (“what Google doesn’t know will hurt you”) that cinches the decsion between a standards- or Flash-based site–not because of Google per se, but because of what Google represents: what Jeffrey Zeldman calls the forward-compatibility of your website.

But then, using Google to argue for web standards and accessibility is so 2002. It’s far trendier to deconstruct blogs out of hand. It’s so much fun. Let’s try it:

Hi. I’m writing about how blogging has made me lots of money. Let me wow you with my aristocratic opinions about television. Did I mention that I’m doing web design? Google is great. Hey, blog deconstruction is fun! Let’s try it…

The best part of that game is that it never ends; it’s turtles all the way down.

Anyway. I’m also working on a web design consultation. This is great, because I get to work on my technical writing skills and not have the burden of doing any markup whatsoever. Not that I don’t like thinking in HTML, but consulting takes me one step closer to the project management career track that I’m aiming for. That, and it has the lovely ring of “getting paid for my opinions” to it. Sam Andreades introduced me to this concept in a sermon several months back (ironically, a sermon about being humble), and it sounded like a fantastic idea. I love to hear myself talk–so much so that I think others should have to pay to hear me talk, too.

Narcissistic tendencies notwithstanding, both of these projects have brought me back to why I love software in the first place: good software is about empowering people. If you write software, never ever forget this. If you use software, neglect of this principle is the essence of what makes you want to hurl your computer out the window. Writing good software should always be about enabling people to do new, cool stuff that they only previously could have imagined. I have a personal aspiration at work, “to be recognized as a creator and leader of insanely great technology.” The nod to Steve Jobs here is inevitable; when Apple is successful, it is because they have men and women who take this empowerment principle very seriously.

Some consultants run their businesses on the very opposite of this idea: the more the client is locked into a proprietary system to which they have exclusive knowledge rights, the more secure their employ. The payout on this principle, though, delivers diminishing returns and actually limits your skill set (read: makes you dumber) over time. Why spend your precious time (and your client’s precious money) building things you’ll have to change six to eight months from now? In the end, you spend too much time fixing stupid problems and adding marginally useful features. Things the client should be able to fix. Time that should be spent dreaming up new and interesting ways to empower people. Helping people accomplish great things that they were never able to do before is more than just good business, it’s also far more rewarding work.