The Less-Than-Illustrious Career Of Ron Scott, part one

A brief history of my career and workflow in the field of graphic and web design.

By Ron Scott April 30th, 2009

The beginning.

I was in Grade 7. To most people, being in the seventh grade means you are still doing low-level schoolwork, going through puberty, and in love with boy bands (if you’re a guy) or Hannah Montana (if you’re a girl). But I wasn’t a typical 12 year-old. I was homeschooled, which meant I was doing schoolwork at least a year ahead of everyone else, and that I had a lot of free time. What did I do with this time? Well, at first I spend a lot of time writing stories. Some of them ended up being over 15,000 words long, and quite good (for a seventh grader). But then, in the fall of 2004 (I think it was October) I began reading a few introductory books on building webpages. The most prominent of these was “Webpages for Dummies”. DOH! I obtained a copy of HomeSite 4.4, and installed it on my parents’ old Pentium 3, Windows 98 computer. I was on top of the world. By January and February of 2005, I had built my skills up to the point where I didn’t have to refer to the books or the software’s help contents, just to find the basic HTML tags.

A little bit of piczo-hating, please.

Thankfully, I never got into the habit of using WYSIWYG editors for the creation of websites. From the start I was in the coding, and, looking back, I can see this practice advanced my skill level faster. So even today, I am unusually giddy and untrustworthy of using WSIWYG software for anything. And I find it very hard to see anything good about any piczo websites.

So most of 2005 was spent playing around in ol’ HomeSite. Like all decent sentimentalists, I really wish I had kept this work, but I still have a few old things kicking around on floppy disks (the only way to have things kicking around).

Please stick around for part two of this biography, coming to a recycle bin near you.

Tags: 2005, career, history, homesite, Life, piczo hate