(no subject)

[owlectomy]

In every endeavor, you get the first flush of enthusiasm, and then the entirely-too-high ambitions, and then you run into the first thing you don't know how to do, and every attempt to solve the problem just further reveals the limitations of what you know how to do, and then you keep putting in new keywords into search engines to bang at this one little thing that won't come out the way you want it, and you get stuck in a trough of despair because to make any real progress would involve going back and trying to get a better ground-level understanding of things, and then you give up and decide you aren't going to learn Drupal after all.

Well, I'm going to go back and try things again, but it'll have to wait till I pull back from the whole trough-of-despair thing.

I'm also in the three months of the year when I can't use my desktop because my living room isn't air-conditioned, so that doesn't help.

I would really like to be a good enough just-for-myself/just-for-fun web designer that I can hack together something simple that looks good, without having to rely entirely on other people's themes and code. But I suspect it's like writing, where there are absolutely no shortcuts to good taste and trial-and-error successive approximations toward something that works.

Comments

[meaghansketch]

At the moment I've decided that what can be done by a professional is so far from what I can currently put together, so I ended up just buying a theme for my site... (not the current one, a new one I'm working on... or will be someday) I guess it's the right decision for me but you end up having to modify so much, and since you didn't code it yourself in the first place you have no idea what anything does or how to change anything. No easy solutions.

[owlectomy]

I think your standards for good-enough-just-for-fun web design must be higher than mine -- in that I am reasonably sure I could get there with the coding knowledge I have now and, like, a smidge more graphic design skills. (And your graphic design skills are above mine by way more than a smidge, needless to say!)

It's definitely not a bad thing to buy a paid theme, but yeah, the time and effort to personalize it are not insignificant. I wouldn't be hacking into this much code if I didn't keep seeing jobs ads that had Drupal as a preferred skill.

I wonder about that -- I mean, I hope there aren't too many libraries hoping to find a librarian and a front-end web designer in the same body. If they want someone who can add content to a pre-existing CMS framework, that's a way different beast from someone who can install Drupal from scratch, make a theme for it, etc. But all they say is "Drupal skills preferred." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[meaghansketch]

Yeah, I can't imagine that they want someone who can create an entire Drupal website from scratch (though rudimentary php/ css/ html/customization knowledge can't hurt)

The thing is, my standards aren't 'good-enough-just-for-fun'... When people are looking at an artist's portfolio site, they want to see something slick, current, and polished... even if the artist's discipline has nothing to do with web design. You have to show that you have a strong design sensibility in everything that you do, so you can't just have an OK website and say 'oh, but I'm an animator, not a web designer' anymore. Especially not with all these slick-looking paid themes that people have.

Hopefully the standards for librarians are a *little* bit lower than that.

[j00j]

Drupal is a beast to learn. The diagram in this is kind of not an exaggeration. http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/drupal-learning-curve/
It doesn't mean you should give up, and it does mean it's legit hard.

I learned what I know on work's dime, and it took a combination of playing around, courses offered by a local development firm, and working to develop our CMS with said firm. It's taking the development firm plus several in-house staff to build, maintain, and migrate content into the thing. We could do it with fewer people if we'd done something more prefab, but it would still take multiple people with very specific skills. For context, I mostly do project management and user support, but I can also create views and content types. Themeing and module development I don't know much about because we've got other people who can do it much better.

I think a reasonable Drupal skillset for a librarian would be a) definitely adding content to a pre-existing CMS b) perHAPS developing new views or content types if the CMS isn't complete, or if they want new things to be added. c) If they're not already on Drupal and want to be, involving librarians in planning the CMS for someone else to develop could be good. I think librarians with good technology skills are well-positioned to understand Drupal's goofy nature and make good choices about how to structure content and create taxonomies, etc. if needed. But ok, I'm biased, because I'm a library school grad who wound up in IT.

That being said, there may be libraries writing unrealistic job ads. I've seen some that expect you to be a systems librarian, a web developer, an instructional designer, and about 3 other jobs all in one.

[owlectomy]

Thank you, that is helpful! I think I installed a distribution that really had way too much stuff in it and was totally unsuited for a beginner; now that I've gone back to the default distribution, and a very simple theme, I'm back to "Oh, this is like Wordpress, just with a whole bunch more stuff in it" -- which seems like a good base from which I can tackle the harder stuff.