Dear Janine,

I picked up your training video for EW2 after playing through the introductory version that came bundled with EW2.

I’ve diligently worked my way through the first 6 chapters thus far and am totally blown away by the quality and depth you’ve covered. You’ really done a fantastic and amazing job. I find myself “grieving” that the information is rapidly coming to an end.

My background: I was a software designer for some 25 years, including the final 11.5 of those at Microsoft (working in the Complex Scripts part of the International part of Office). I happily left about 4.5 years ago to pick up a camera full-time instead. My wife and I are both shooters, a two-person team, and having an awesome time. We’re both huge animal lovers as well, so using your wildlife templates for the learning has been great.

I picked up EW2, as we’re expanding to offer simple, limited-scope websites for small businesses. The need is clearly out there, especially in the current economy. From a design point of view, we’re talking about very static sites, 4 or 5 web pages, and no information capture from website viewers. We may expand that role at a future date, but not with our initial efforts.

One of the things I’ve been particularly impressed with — I’m no stranger to HTML, at least how it was typically used 5+ years ago (lots of tables ? ghaaaa!). At that time, CSS was becoming more popular but I had no exposure to it; most of my work was with enabling the Office apps to support complex languages such as Hebrew, Thai, Arabic, Mongolian, the Indic family, and so on for client-side apps (lots of C++, C#, etc.).

So the design tips you pass along are all received under the scrutinizing eye of an old dev, and you’ve truly done a great job. I was constantly amazed at how perfectly your video examples exactly matched what I was seeing in EW2. That just doesn’t happen with most training I’ve seen or worked with. I did have to be very careful in many places to just click on the right portions of a given lesson (e.g., tags vs. content, ensuring the right context menu was showing), but being careful made everything work exactly as you explained. How many times have we encountered tutorials that miss a step, and then everything just falls apart?

Again: fantastic and so very well done!

Questions for you:

1. What would you recommend to continue my CSS education? I’m assuming there’s lots more to be learned, but I have very little time as a business owner to try a lot more varieties of training — if there’s anything more even out there. I’m very much a hands-on learner, so I prefer video tutorials.

2. Similarly, is there any training or learning resource you’d recommend to get up to speed for SEO?

3. I may be needing to purchase templates to correspond to some of our future clients. Can you recommend any providers? In particular, we’ll likely need certain medical/dental “looks.”

4. I need to ensure that sites we create will look good on mobile devices (PDAs, phones, etc.). I’d greatly appreciate any design best practices you could recommend.

Again, thank you for creating such a great product, and I’m hoping you can guide me with the questions I have posed.

Best wishes,
Jerry

Hi Jerry,

First, let me thank you for your kind, kind words about my videos.

Here are some of my favorite places to become more advanced with CSS:

http://digitalfamily.com/dreamweaver/css-tutorials/css-resources.html

SEO is a huge topic. Although I work at it, it’s not my specialty, but one popular site on the topic is www.SearchEngineWatch.com

You can also learn a lot just by exploring what Google says on its site.

As far as templates are concerned, there are many, many template sites out there and I don’t endorse any one over another. I generally create my own designs.

I’m also working on creating sites that will look good on mobile devices. I hope to add more resources to my site in the future about designing for mobile.

Hope that helps and I wish you all the best with your sites and your wonderful photography,

Janine

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