Green is not becoming
12.09.2008 @ 11:29pm
filed under: Personal
A friend of mine sent me an email. She’s not a particularly close friend – someone I haven’t seen in a very long time. But we keep in touch via the internet in that kind of disconnected way you do with people you like but probably won’t see again. The email wasn’t very long. It was basically just a little note she’d sent to all her friends to tell them about her new business. Her new web design business.
I ‘d be lying if I told you I wasn’t more than a little jealous. Here I am, with lots of thoughts and ideas in my head, and there she is actually doing something. So I went over to her site and I caught my breath. It was horrible.
It was full of jargon and stock images. It used phrases I’ve never heard of – and I read web design blogs daily. It tried to obfuscate her lack of real knowledge with phrases that made her sound like she knew something, as long as her clients didn’t know anything. She talked about web standards, so I had a look at her code. Everything was laid out with tables. There were span tags that didn’t even contain content. It all said, “Hi, I used a WSYWIG editor and have NFI what I’m doing”.
But you know, she did it. She went out there and started a business. And got a client. I want to email her and tell her all the things she’s doing wrong, but I can’t. All I can do is say “OMG, that’s fantastic! Best of luck!”. Because otherwise, really, all it is is the sniping of someone who’s still sitting on the sidelines.
I could do it better. Maybe it’s time for me to finally stop thinking about it and just do it. If I think I could do it so much better, maybe I should give it a try.