Born profoundly deaf, Stephen J. Hopson didn’t let that stand in the way of fulfilling his dreams. He landed his first job on Wall Street at a major New York bank. Ten years later, he left this secure position to further his career as an award-winning stockbroker. He made aviation history by becoming the world’s first deaf instrument-rated pilot in 2006.

Because he wanted to inspire others to overcome their shortcomings, usually imaginary, the way Stephen had experienced his life; he turned his life’s journey into a national bestselling book Obstacle Illusions: Transforming Adversity into Success [affiliate link]. Through his writings and keynote speeches, Stephen is inspiring thousands of people worldwide to believe in themselves and achieve the impossible.

How did the book project come about?

The book had been in the making for over a decade after I quit Wall Street. I began hanging out in coffee shops in the city and writing stories, reaching deep within me and pulling out life experiences and putting them on paper. Soon, I was submitting some of them for publication as a way of testing my writing talents and to my surprise, it got accepted in three then-bestselling books. (Chicken Soup for the College Soul [affiliate link] was one of them.)

That gave me confidence to keep writing, which I very much enjoyed doing. In 2000, after hundreds of rejections, I landed a prominent literary agent named Joseph Dupreos who was, at that time, representing Mother Teresa. I thought for sure we would get a big book publishing contract. But after months of working on the book proposal and then approaching them, all of them turned us down.

The book went on the back burner for 10 years while I pursued other things of interest. Along the way, I had several people help me edit the manuscript while I added and deleted chapters. Eventually, I had a 300-page manuscript. On the advice of experienced authors, I cut it in a half, which is what is now the book Obstacle Illusions: Transforming Adversity Into Success [affiliate link]. The other half will eventually be book #2. I finished it a year ago and then hired a professional editor and cover designer to assist with the finalizing of the book. It’s been a long road!

What will book #2 focus on? How is it different from Obstacle Illusions?

It will be mostly a “how-to” book based on my life experiences.

How did you land your agent?

Sent hundreds of one page query letters outlining the book’s purpose and invited them to request the book proposal, which I wrote with the help of Write the Perfect Book Proposal [affiliate link] by Jeff Herman.

How long did it take to write the book?

Ten years or so.

What was the writing process for the book?

I broke it down into manageable tasks. I bought a bulletin board and a stack of index cards. Every day, at the beginning, I allocated a time block (usually an hour or two) and thought about what kind of chapters I wanted to create and then wrote titles on the cards.

They were put up on the board and I was free to move them around anytime I felt inspired to do so. Then I would pick a chapter idea that inspired me on any given morning and start writing the chapter. That was my daily commitment.

How is your book different from other personal development books from people who faced similar challenges in their lives?

They contain signature stories of things that have happened to me. People like stories because they can relate to them more than dry facts. The book gives people a chance to take a peek into my life and how I got to be where I am. People have told me they felt all kinds of emotions while reading about my experiences. Each chapter ends with a life lesson and a series of interactive type questions.

How do the emotions help them? If they read the life lesson and answer the questions, what will they walk away with?

Emotions are universal. We all have the ability to tap into them and reading a good story is a good way to help them feel better about themselves. A good story reminds them they are not alone.

Here are a few things I hope readers will walk away with:

• When we make up our mind about something, we set the universe in motion. Forces beyond our ability to comprehend, far more subtle and complex than we could imagine, are engaged in a process, the dynamics of which the human race is just beginning to understand. In other words, make a firm decision and go for your dreams! You will be supported!!
• Nothing happens by chance. Everything happens for a reason. Look for the good in everything. If you look hard enough you’ll see healing taking place in there somewhere.
• Don’t force your hand — learn to stop being control freaks and surrender the final outcome. Trust that things will happen at the right time.
• Everything you need to achieve your dreams will be made available through divinely orchestrated events — the appearance of the right people, and other resources you may not have previously thought possible. In other words, trust the universe to guide and provide for you along your journey.
• Some people call this coincidence, others, synchronicity. Whatever you call it, it all stems from you. You create your reality. So why not go for what you really want!!!

Please share a time of when you faced an obstacle and overcame it or learned from it.

When I went to a seminar for speakers and just happened to be low on funds. When it came time for lunch, I went to the hotel’s restaurant with another participant because it was sweltering hot outside and I didn’t want to venture outdoors. Everything on the menu cost over $20 except for the soup of the day which was $9.99. That’s exactly what I had in my pocket so I ordered that, stuffing free crackers in my pocket in case I got hungry later.

After the seminar was over, I went home and went straight to the mailbox to check my mail. As I was flipping through the stack of mail, I noticed a flaming red envelope, which stood out. Curious, I opened that first and as I was doing that, something fell out and floated to the floor like a butterfly in slow motion. It took me a minute to realize what it was. A ten dollar bill! I knew immediately it was the universe that just paid for my lunch earlier that day. The lesson was “It’s the universe’s job to take care of you, if you let it.”

I want people to realize that when you act on faith and pursue your dreams (in my case that was quitting a lucrative six-figure career on Wall Street to become a speaker), the universe will gather at you feet and support you along the way.

Wall Street jobs tend to involve a lot of meetings and phone calls. And so does being a coach. As a fellow deafie, I know the lipreading is not a science. How did you communicate in these roles?

Yes, indeed. I used my teletypewriter (TTY) and the relay to call clients. I placed buy and sell orders on the computer. Meetings were always a challenge for I didn’t have an interpreter nor did I request one. I just did the best I could while I was there.

Thank you, Stephen, for your time and inspiration.

How did you handle an obstacle? What did you learn from the experience? Have you ever felt the universe took care of you? If so, how?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Meryl Evans

While working for a company, I moved to another position within the same company for a promotion. It was exciting to switch from process management to marketing. It didn’t take long to regret the change. The person I thought I would report to went on a special project and never returned. She had such an energy that I knew I’d love working for her and learning from her. I ended up reporting to someone who would make a great coworker instead of a manager. I also discovered morale was in the basement with this department. A total shift from my previous one.

Then came the waves of nausea to take the situation to a new low. I discovered I was pregnant with number two. Instead of being excited, I was miserable. I liked the company, yet I couldn’t transfer because I hadn’t been in the new job long enough. The excitement of another baby couldn’t bring me out of the darkness of my job situation. After all, I had the nausea thing happening causing me to feel green whenever I drove to the office.

My only choice for getting out of the situation was to leave the company. I landed an interview with another company and the job sounded like it was written with me in mind. But I had a new dilemma that I had never faced before and no one else to ask. Should I tell the hiring manager I was pregnant? I researched this and asked around including a friend who worked in human resources. No one had definitive answers. I knew I couldn’t be the first dealing with this, but I couldn’t find anyone who had.

If I didn’t tell her, I felt like I was cheating her and not being truthful. If I told her, I could lose the opportunity to move to a better position and a happier situation.

I went to the company’s building and met with the manager and a colleague. They explained the position, expectations and hopes for the team. We all clicked.

Then I met with the manager in a one-on-one situation. We had a friendly conversation and she confirmed I was one of the finalists for the job. I paused. Let out deep breath. I explained to her I was in a situation and I felt the right thing to do was to tell her. So there, I told her I was three months pregnant. She responded like coworkers do when they heard of such exciting news.

That company was the last one I worked for before becoming a full-time freelancer. I landed the job and stayed with them for seven years. Interesting twist. The manager took a new job while I was on maternity leave. I returned from leave with no manager and only one colleague left behind (we had four of us when I started). That was another adventure, but one that set me on the path toward my freelance writing career.

So while I regretted accepting the promotion, it sent me on my way to eventually landing my first paid writing gig and becoming a full-time freelancer. Had I stayed with the original company, that might have never happened.

This post is an entry in the What I Learned from Adversity group writing project.

By the way, I had a third child. That was a breeze to announce to the boss as I was still with the company and it had been over three years since #2 arrived.

Making the most of the Web as a communications medium can ensure Web sites take advantage of what the Web is today. Television, radio, telephones, and libraries are considered standard media and each one has its own characteristics and ways of making its mark regardless of the content sent via its medium. Curt Cloninger of and author of Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground, explains that everything is something and we need to figure out what the Web already is and how to best use it to accomplish our goals.

He has the right idea in that we need to give the Web a chance to grow and get its own identity. We need to understand what it has to offer. How often have we heard that we look like a parent? A sibling? How about we look like ourselves? Furthermore, do we treat every child in the exact same way? Most of us adapt how we communicate with a child based on his needs, his strengths and weaknesses.

Cloninger identifies six characteristics that all apply to the Web, but each character is neither new nor unique to the Web. Most Web services take advantage of two or more characteristics; it’s rare to find a Web service that uses all six. Understanding that the Web is an emerging communications medium with six characteristics that can combine and / or partner with other media will help businesses determine the schemes that would apply best to meet its Web service needs.

Many-to-Many Networking
Many-to-many networking enables a group of individuals to collaborate or communicate with each other. Before the Internet became popular, such networking occurred through telephone conference calls or three-way calling. Examples now include email, bulletin board, chat rooms, instant messenger, open source software development community, decryption via distributed computing, modular Web services, and multi-user interfaces where users can do multiple things at the same time.

Open source communities have online discussions, bulletin boards, and online collaboration. The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community for open source software development projects relating to the Apache server. They offer a variety of forums for participating and contributing to the foundation’s projects.

Decryption via distributed computing is best explained with Cloninger’s example of a group of cryptographers that encrypted a message in such a way that no single computer would ever be able to decrypt the message using mere brute force attacks. They offered a cash prize to anyone who could decrypt the message to determine how secure was the encryption.

A large number of people on the Internet formed a pool and took all the possible brute force approaches, breaking them up into small chunks. Everyone signed up for a chunk while someone wrote a program to crunch the possibilities, and each participant downloaded and installed the program on his machine. Whoever’s machine decrypted the message first reported the answer and received a special bonus from the group, and the rest evenly split the winnings. They succeeded in decryption the message as in "decryping via distributed computing."

Cloninger says that just by coupling a many-to-many network with automation, something previously considered scientifically impossible became possible.

Module Web service is another example of many-to-many networking. When a business doesn’t have the sources or skills to implement a feature in-house, it can add a modular service such as site search engines, mapping capabilities, or shopping cart capabilities. In these examples, it’s not necessary to download software to make it work. Instead, it’s a matter of tweaking a few things and copying code into a Web page to network with the original source.

How does many-to-many working work with other characteristics? You may think email is only one characteristic, but actually it also has time-shifting whereas online chats are live. Decryption and modular Web services also have automation involved.

Multimedia
For many, the first contact with multimedia was through CD-ROMs, which offered more than just text and still images. To prove the point of needing two or more characteristics on a Web service, Cloninger questions why offer movies on the Web when there are cable, satellite, and movie rental stores available? A service needs to go beyond the basic demand to reach visitors in a way that no other service can.

Born Magazine puts together something that can’t be duplicated in video or print requiring your participating to move forward. Unlike watching television, the visitor can control the pace and the action while hearing sounds and seeing animation. Only CD-ROMs and the Web can offer this kind of multimedia hybrid experience.

Database
Before computers, we had library card catalogs for databases. You could look for a book by title, subject, or author last name. Keywords or subjects were limited to pre-selected words and could not be mixed up to form new combinations. Computers arrive and ease the search process and broaden it by allowing more keywords and getting results within seconds.

Dictionary.com is a Web service that mixes database and automation. It has a database of dictionary words as well as a thesaurus. Enter a word to get its meaning, click on Thesaurus to get more words with similar meaning. Listings can include links to related Web sites for more information.

Another powerful database is Internet Movie Database with a large collection of movies and television programming, dates, actors, directors, characters, quotes, pictures and much more. When watching a movie and unable to place a familiar face, look it up on Internet Movie Database and instant answers.

Combined with search engines, databases can help you find almost anything including forgotten words from a song, passages from the Bible, quotes from a speech or magazine to name very few of the numerous possibilities of what a database can do.

Automation
Automation is often partnered with databases, but it’s a separate entity because it is a program in itself and processes input like word processor software and ATMs. You’re looking for more than just text. Babelfish gives you the option of entering a Web page address or up to 150 words of text and it translates it for you.

To see another example, click on sixth button from the right at Monocrafts to view the Fingertrack studies. Click start and move your mouse for approximately one minute. The software records and stores your movement, a time-shift factor. Enter your name so that your movements are labeled. The next person comes and does the same thing. After both participants finish, the program takes both movements and has each one holding half of a whole “digital string” doing a dance with the middle of the string behaving based on the two inputs.

A similar idea to Monocrafts is Anemone, which is an online whiteboard that multiple people can draw on at the same time. Cloninger’s playground, Market-o-matic allows visitors to pick and choose text and enter it to get a self-created artist’s statement for their latest art du jour.

Turux is a site full of abstract Flash and Shockwave animations of which are interactive. You can make an impact on the outcome of the automated drawings by moving and clicking the mouse. Without any mouse action, the animation will continue on a set pattern until the mouse movements enter and tweak it. This Turux activity is an example of collaborating with automated software in real-time mode.

Live and / or Time-Shifted
When listening to the radio, it can be either live or time-shifted depending on the content. Most radio call-in shows are live, but the music they play is time-shifted since the singer is not currently singing the song. She recorded the song to allow radio stations to play it based on their schedules or requests.

When an auction is active on eBay, it’s considered live based on its current standings. After the auction ends, it becomes time-shifted as you review the results.

One of the more popular online events is Photoshop tennis where two players using a PhotoShop or other graphics program volley by making changes to the latest picture. The games is live on Fridays as viewers can watch the match while the commentator provides colorful feedback on each volley. The game is also time-shifted because viewers can watch the archived game after it has ended and vote.

Many of the television networks make it possible for viewers to watch the current news reports live through steaming media as well as archiving older reports for time-shifted viewing.

Location-Independent and / or Device-Dependent
Mobile computing is quickly gaining worldwide acceptance through PDAs, cellular phones, and other technologies enabling users to stay connected and access information whenever and wherever needed. Originally, cell phones connected people who were not near a static telephone. The technology has taken another step and connects users to email, Internet, and GPS technologies. These help people become more location-independent, gaining information regardless of location.

Web Services is a new area that is expected to take off because of its device-independence capabilities. Web Services will make it possible for information to flow from one place to another regardless of device or application. We can access Web Services through SOAP, XML, and other similar open standard technologies.

All of these characteristics are mixed and matched to enhance the capabilities of the Web. Prior to the Web invasion, Radio programs took a step forward to connect with its listeners by adding call-in capabilities for song requests or contests. The addition of Web services allows television programs to enhance the user experience by providing online polls, playing along with the game, or entering questions relating to a program’s topic.

Amazon has taken shopping to a new level by giving its customers the ability to review products so others can learn from your good or bad experiences. Amazon users computer technology to good advantage by providing recommendations for its customers based on previous purchases and site visits.

Today’s Web proves itself as a medium performing a wide variety of functions. Tomorrow’s Web promises a myriad of new functions as we take this medium as much for granted as our daily newspaper.

Designing and maintaining Web pages takes a lot of time, but using CSS can save considerable time. If you want to change the font color on all your Web pages, then all you have to do is go to the external CSS file and change it in one place as opposed to going to every HTML page and changing it in the FONT tag.

CSS is not without its drawbacks. Netscape 4.x and other CSS incompatible browsers are still heavily used today and don’t properly display CSS. Furthermore, the growth of wireless devices connected to the Internet makes it a greater challenge.

To overcome the browser challenges, start by determining which browser to use as the baseline. The decision largely depends on your audience. If you have an existing Web site, study its statistics to determine whether or not you want to reach the Netscape 4.x audience. Makiko Itoh of PRODOK.com states that there are three approaches you can consider:

• Make Netscape 4.x the baseline browser – this approach is the most challenging because of the workarounds needed to make it look identical in 4.x.
• Make Internet Explorer 5.0 the baseline browser – This method makes the presentation plain for the Netscape 4.x audience.
• Compromise – Looks best in Netscape 6.x, Explorer 5.5 and higher, and looks satisfactory in Netscape 4.x.

Begin by creating streamlined HTML markup that is well formed and avoids all styling tags such as <FONT>, <CENTER>, and other deprecated tags. See Itoh’s example of a barebones HTML document.

Make sure you have the <DOCTYPE> line at the top of your document. If your document is not completely valid, use the Transitional DOCTYPE or no DOCTYPE.

DOCTYPE examples:

• Strict HTML 4.01: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html3/strict.dtd”>
• Transitional HTML 4.01: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd”>
• Strict XHTML 1.0: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
• Transitional XHTML 1.0: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

Make sure you use closing tags even for <P> and list items. Two HTML elements without closing tags are <BR> and <IMG>. Be aware that XHTML does close them.

Validate the barebones markup using the W3C.org validators and HTML Tidy.

After you confirm that your HTML is clean and has closed tags, you’re ready to add CSS. Let’s review a sample line:

p {font-family: verdana, helvetica, times;}

The p represents the selector or <P> tag. Font-family is the property and must follow : along with the value(s). In this example, anytime <p> comes up in the HTML document, the content appears with the verdana font. If the computer doesn’t have verdana font loaded, then the content will use the second choice of Helvetica.

Unless the user has overridden all author styles with a personal stylesheet, the user should see the entire page in verdana.

For purposes of this article, we’ll add <STYLE> right above the closing </HEAD> section of your HTML file. Everything between /* */ are comments to help you understand what is happening.

<style media=”screen” type=”text/css”>
<!–

/* The next lines tell the browser to render anything in the <p> tag with a font size of 11 pixels and a line height (space between lines of 18 pixels
*/

p {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 18px;
}

/* The next lines tell the browser to render anything in the <h2> tag with a font size of 15 pixels
*/

h2 {
font-size: 15px;
}

/* The next lines tell the browser to render anything in the <body>, <p>, and <h2> tags with a verdana,helvetica,arial,sans-serif font in that order. If the computer doesn’t have verdana, then the next choice is Helvetica.
*/

body,p,h2 {
font-family: verdana,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
}
–>
</style>

Using <!– and –> tags will hide the CSS from older browsers that can’t render CSS. Save the HTML file and take a look at Itoh’s example. Congratulations, you’ve successfully added CSS to your HTML document.

If you decide that you want the <p> font size to be smaller or larger, all you have to do is change the number of pixels as follows:

p {
font-size: 10px;
line-height: 18px;
}

No more having to go through the entire document and changing the numbers in all the <FONT> tags. Expand your <STYLE> to add color and links. The BOLD items are additions to the original <STYLE> in the previous example.

p {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 18px;
color: #eeeeee;
}

h2 {
font-size: 15px;
color: #fc0;
}

b,em {
color: #fc0;
}

body,p,h2 {
font-family: verdana,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
}

body {
background-color: #000000;
color: #eeeeee;
}

/* a:visited are links that your visitors have visited.
*/

a:visited {
text-decoration: none;
color: #ffff99;
background-color: black;
}

/* a:link impacts all links on the page
*/

a:link {
text-decoration: underline;
color: #ff9900;
background-color: black;
}
/* a:hover changes the link when your visitor has the cursor over the link. This does not work in Netscape 4.x
*/

a:hover {
color: black;
background-color: #ffff99;
}

Making the above changes to your <STYLE> should look similar to this example. Feel free to play with the colors, sizes, and font values to see what happens to the document.

CSS offers many more options and makes it easy to change your document styles especially when using an external style sheet. If you link all your documents to one external CSS file, then you can make changes to styles in all of the documents just by modifying the values in the CSS file. The steps outlined in this article are unleashing a little bit of the power of CSS. It can go far beyond and control layouts and other design enhancing features in the latest browsers.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Designer, Author, Visionary, and Speaker

Jeffrey Zeldman is an outspoken web designer, author, and speaker. His book, Taking Your Talent to the Web has received high accolades. Zeldman is the publisher and creative director of A List Apart, co-founder and current group leader of The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition fighting for standards on the web; and founder of Happy Cog, the New York City web design firm.

Tell us about your early career that obviously has some artistic make up that is often reflected in your Web designs and writings.

I was novelist who couldn’t sell his novels; a composer who barely made a living; a synthesizer player in a post-punk techno-surf band with a small but ardent following and a manager who was a member of the Communist party. I ended up in advertising, where I was able to earn a living while focusing my creativity and learning about communication, brand identity, and the gentle art of drinking before noon.

You got two Bloggies in 2001. Why do you think Blogs are so popular? Why are people interested in reading about other ordinary people?

With a few notable exceptions, awards are meaningless. I learned that in advertising, where there are a few genuine awards that everyone wishes they could earn (Communication Arts, One Club), but where anyone can win plenty of other awards. You get a regional Addy for “best use of spot color varnish in a non-standard billboard on Rural Route 7,” and you state on your resume that you won an Addy. Like I said, there are some truly meaningful awards. I didn’t win many. Nobody does. I won the other stuff.

The Bloggies are nice, though, because it’s an award from one’s peers. That has meaning to me.

I’m not sure why anyone is interested in other people’s lives, other than the fact that as human beings we are always interested in what our neighbors are doing.

We are also interested in what Tom and Nicole are doing, in what Meg Ryan is doing, and it’s kind of nice that we can transfer that emotion to our peers. Never mind Tom and Nicole, what about Meg and Jason? It’s odd but well intended, I think.

I think we all grew up wanting to be rock stars and movie stars and the Web provides the illusion that we are living this fantasy. (See Joshua Davis dot com.)

I don’t write about my life very much and I don’t think I would have won an award if I did. Mainly I write about web design. Of course, to me, web design is incredibly personal. I confine my confessional writing to a section of my site called “My Glamorous Life.” It’s an ironic title but some people may miss that.

You spoke on the topic of “What Do Today’s Web Designers Need To Know” at Web Design 2001 in Atlanta. For us unlucky folks who didn’t get to attend, what do we need to know?

Two things, really. The first is that web design is communication. Good websites are conversations. I can talk about that for a long time but not here, not now.

The second thing all web designers should know is that the way we build sites must change and will. The way we’ve been building them – to the quirks of individual browsers instead of to a common set of standards – is wrong for a lot of reasons. Suffice to say, the Web is broken, and all of us helped to break it. All of us can fix that by learning about and using W3C recommendations, but at a cost of decreased attractiveness and limited functionality in some old browsers that don’t support these recommendations. For more about that, read “Why Don’t You Code for Netscape?” at A List Apart. Pardon the plug.

The dot com bomb dust has finally settled. What do you see for the Web’s future regarding online businesses?

The Web has not been hurt; businesses have been hurt. In some ways, the Web has been helped, since it is now less likely to be cluttered by a lot of useless, ill-conceived junk. Investors won’t drop their life savings on useless junk; agencies won’t build sites that promote it. With less ugly glut to sift through, Web users may actually find sites that provide real value.

But many really good companies got hurt, many really good ideas have died or gone on the respirator, many really talented people are waiting tables instead of designing Web interfaces, and that is tragic. When it started, some said nervously, “Good, that will get rid of all the idiots and poseurs.” Instead, we saw some of our most talented and visionary people hit the wall. It is terribly sad, and a bit frightening. Two of my favorite clients – really smart folks – are bleeding right now. I not only feel for them, I worry for me, too.

Will we get through this? Sure, most of us will. How can we survive at this time? I asked a group of Web designers, developers, and content folks, and they shared their answers in ALA Issue 97. Pardon the plug.

What do you think Web consultants should do now that companies can’t pay big bucks for fancy schmancy Web sites?

What they should always have done: help their clients analyze what they have to offer, decide what is most valuable about it, and create accessible, attractive sites that communicate real things to real people.

In tandem with that, stop importing bogus business values to a medium and an industry that were never about those values. As a client, I don’t care about your suit, I don’t care about your 24-foot ceilings and reconditioned loft space and networked video games; I care about the work. Do you understand my business? Can you communicate it in a Web-specific way? Can you entertain, teach, extend my reach and my brand? Can you do all that without expecting a Hollywood budget? Then I want you to work for me. If you can afford the 24-foot ceilings, good for you; if not, I don’t care.

You’ve spent a lot of time and energy as a warrior for Web standards through Web Standards Project (WaSP) that you lead. Since much of the W3.org’s specs are written in a foreign language to most of us, what are some key things we should know? (Note: To learn about reading specs, check out A List Apart’s article on How to Read W3C Specs

I’m having them translated into English now, and will let you know when that’s done.

I *think* CSS-3 is about increased power and flexibility – for instance, making it trivial to do with Style Sheets what we now do easily with HTML table-based layouts, but have a tough time pulling off in CSS.

But I’m in the trenches with every other Web designer; what we really need now is solid support for CSS-1. With a few exceptions, we have that in the latest versions of IE, Navigator, and Opera. (The Mac browser iCab is getting there too.) But previous versions of some of these browsers are so badly broken in their CSS implementations that using even the most basic parts of CSS-1 can cause some of these browsers to crash.

This has led many developers to shelve CSS and continue building broken sites with non-standard, non-validating HTML extensions and workarounds in the name of backward compatibility. The absurdity is that browser makers have finally given us what we asked for three years ago, and now many of us are afraid to use it. It’s a cycle that can only be broken by taking bold steps. I’ve been selling my clients on the notion of “forward compatibility” via standards compliance, and I’ve been lucky enough to find clients like The New York Public Library who want what I’m selling.

Forward compatibility isn’t essential for every site – if you’re designing a movie website, with a shelf life of twelve months, it hardly matters if you use HTML or XHTML … but for most sites my partners and I get asked to design, long-term durability does matter. If long-term durability matters to your site, then you need to learn about web standards, or hire designers and developers who know about them. The New York Public Library’s Standards-Compliant Style Guide can help anybody get up to speed with a basic, standards-compliant interim strategy that looks forward without leaving anyone behind.

iPlanet has sent shockwaves by rolling out Netscape 4.79 to please businesses that won’t get with the program. Armed with this info, what should Web designers do when designing for behind the times browsers?

WaSP actually asked developers to learn about and use W3C recommendations, and to inform their audience that better browsers are readily available and may be downloaded for free. How developers choose to implement these suggestions – if they choose to implement them at all – depends on the nature of each site and its audience. We expect that developers will analyze their audience and develop their own strategies and language.

Why do we encourage users (not developers) to upgrade their browsers? For the same reason Firestone encourages drivers to trade in unsafe tires. Previous browsers were not built to support CSS-1, HTML/XHTML 4, ECMAScript, XML, and the DOM; the big two browsers, in particular, were built to compete with each other by any means necessary. Their focus was on proprietary technologies, and the market (web users, developers) didn’t tell them that standards were important. So support for standards in these browsers was often partial, often spotty, sometimes worse than no support at all. (It’s better not to support CSS-1 than to support it so badly that websites crash.)

Continuing to rely on broken browsers is not a healthy long-term strategy for Web users. Ultimately all Web developers will build standards-compliant sites, and these users will be hurt. We’re encouraging them to upgrade now, while most sites are still patched together with browser-specific code and non-valid markup.

Where can developers learn about W3C recommendations without getting a PhD? Web Review has numerous articles working designers and developers can follow. A List Apart has a DOM series, a CSS series, and other articles anyone in the field can understand and use. We even try to make it entertaining, since learning new things can be daunting. (Pardon the plug.)

There’s good stuff at Web Reference, Webmonkey and Builder. Peter-Paul Koch runs a good DOM mailing list. Apple has good stuff. And as I mentioned earlier, the NYPL Style Guide will certainly help. (Pardon the plug.)

What do you think advertisers should be doing to get our attention in an already overcrowded and overzealous Web world?

Sponsoring instead of running banners. Sponsoring design sites, community sites and forums, independent sites. I saw two of the Cluetrain guys discuss this idea at Geek Pride 2000.

Get rid of the rhetoric, which businesses often find disturbing, and you’re left with a core idea that any smart marketer will probably respond to: people use the Web to have conversations with each other. An advertiser who facilitates those conversations will be much better-received than one who interrupts the conversations.

Advertisers can facilitate conversations by providing bandwidth: this forum about child safety is brought to you by Toys-R-Us. That’s it; no sales message, no banners, no tie-ins (“Thanks for discussing your child’s well-being! Save 5% when you order now!”). None of that junk that sophisticated consumers reject in old media and resent in new media. If I’ve learned something valuable about my child’s well-being, I’ll feel kindly disposed toward Toys-R-Us for sponsoring the message board.

Similarly, this design site brought to you by Macromedia (no ad message), this XML discussion site brought to you by O’Reilly Publishing (no ad message).

Can it work? Apple and Macromedia have both done something like that with the design site K10k. It remains to be seen if other advertisers will have the guts to try this on more conventional sites. They may as well: what they’re doing now isn’t working. And what they tried a couple of years ago – big bandwidth interstitials – didn’t seem to work very well either.

You admitted in a past interview you don’t know what “great Web design means.” Then, what do you think are the most important things in a good Web site (other than Web Standards compliance)?

Sometimes great graphic design isn’t great Web design: for instance when it is inappropriate to the audience, message, or technology best suited to the audience’s needs. Sometimes what looks best *is* best. It’s great when that happens. Sometimes the best design is one that is simple, elegant, understated, low-bandwidth, and degrades well. But this kind of design never wins awards, and designers have to be willing to live with that if they wish to do the right thing on a site like that.

To me, overall, a great website is one where I feel I am communing with a mind – as I feel when I listen to music, read a novel, watch a movie. Music and movies are collaborative, as are most websites, but one still feels a one-to-one communication with a creative mind – a dialogue between viewer and author – and websites that can achieve the same thing have a greatness to them. It is easier to achieve this on personal sites than on commercial sites, especially commercial sites that have to perform 1,000 functions for 100 different types of user.

On a site that must be many things for many kinds of people, design greatness lies in the architecture. I don’t care what my neighbor hopes to achieve on the site; can I achieve what I want to? Can I do it without thinking too hard? Do I have to search? Will my first search fail? Will I be asked to learn what “Boolean” means because the site architects didn’t foresee my needs?

Complex sites should only rarely rely on back-up functionality like Search forms. No matter how many users they are intended to satisfy, they should always feel like they were designed to allow me to do what I need to. This is a very tough thing to pull off, but it often makes the difference between success and failure.

Then again, I still can’t figure out Ebay and my friend, who doesn’t understand the Macintosh file management system, can buzz through Ebay like Sherman marched through Georgia. I don’t think Ebay is intuitively structured or well-designed on any level, but it’s one of the most successful sites ever dropped onto the Web, so why are you even talking to me?

And a bad Web site?

A bad site is hard to use. A bad site is easy to use but does not communicate. A bad site is easy to use and communicates, but it does not communicate the right message to its intended audience. A bad site is easy to use and communicates the right message, but the site serves no actual human need and should not have been created at all.

A bad site commands, a good site invites. A bad site throws up barriers, a good site opens like the petals of a flower. A bad site displeases no one and therefore greatly pleases no one; a good site, like a good book, like good music, greatly pleases some while turning off others.

A bad site tells me what I already know and does not tell me what I came to find out.

A bad site repurposes non-Web content; a good site offers design and content created for an online audience. A bad site shovels text down a loveless hole of ugliness; a good site attempts to make text easy to read and attractive. A bad site does not guide or guides but provides no options. A good site guides and offers alternatives. A bad site works only one way when it works at all. A good site works exactly as its designers intended, yet I feel it works the way I want it to.

What approach do you recommend for dealing with site maintenance?

Here is what you do. As much as possible, you separate style from content. Either with Web standards, or with an ugly stupid overpriced publishing system, or with a smart publishing system, of which there are too few.

Then you train your client (if the client will be updating the site). Then you find out everything you can about the software the client will use to update the site. Is he going to take your lovely standards-compliant template and start banging out FrontPage extensions without even realizing it? Find out. Recommend. Teach.

Before beginning the site, explain what you are going to do, educate the client about the technology involved, keep educating the client throughout the process, do it again when you finish, do it again two months later. Before handing off the site, create a Style Guide that doesn’t require an MFA in Design to understand. Take the client through the Style Guide. Do it repeatedly.

After all that, the client will still mess up the site.

What are some examples of what you consider a smart publishing system?

Manilla, Blogger, Greymatter and Movable Type all seem to do a very good job at publishing specific kinds of sites. I think with R&D money and time, these tools could be expanded to do more, and to work with more complex types of sites. I haven’t worked with these tools but thousands have and I’ve seen the results. I’ve also seen a demo of some of the more sophisticated things Manilla can do. I suspect the others have tricks up their sleeves as well.

I’ve heard good things about Zope, and my girlfriend swears by it (not at it), as do some sysadmin folks I respect.

I’ve had bad experiences with expensive publishing systems used by some of my clients. These systems seemed overly complex yet terribly limited. My experience with them has been echoed by others who’ve come in contact with them – designers, builders, and clients. My sense is that these products are way too expensive and was way over hyped when they launched.

Colleagues and I have done some limited work with more traditional backend technologies like Cold Fusion and PHP. These tools seem very powerful, but they’re not something you hand to a client, they’re something you build with, and maintaining structures with these tools requires a certain amount of knowledge. I have seen clients totally take to these kinds of technologies (say, to update a bulletin board system). One problem I’ve had recently with Cold Fusion is that it really seems to want me to do everything in HTML tables and FONT tags. This could be due to my limited understanding or it could be that the software is optimized for the “traditional” way we build sites.

Any advice on how Web developers avoid link rot (outdated links)?

Don’t destroy URLs. Never, never. The only acceptable excuse for link rot is going out of business. It kills me that professionally-staffed, million dollar content sites routinely change their entire file structure, or delete articles that are a month or two old. News sites do it, software sites do it. Microsoft.com seems to have a fetish about changing their URLs every five minutes. Twenty million people have linked to this page? Good, let’s remove it. Let’s rename it. Let’s get them to perform a Boolean search. I hate this. It’s stupid. It’s beyond stupid. It’s one thing when your grandmother deletes a URL on her homepage. It’s another when a Fortune 500 company does it. I am down with Jakob on this one. I often disagree with Jakob, but on this one we are brothers.

Tell us about your book, Taking Your Talent to the Web and what you’ve learned from the reactions to the book. (Editor’s note: see our book review)

Thanks for asking. Taking Your Talent to the Web is a guide for the designer or communications professional seeking to become a Web designer, or to add Web design to a repertoire of existing skills. For instance, a book designer whose client has asked her to create a small site. She’s not going to stop being a book designer, but she wants to increase her professional range. Or an art director who no longer wishes to do print advertising, who finds the Web intriguing, and wants to become a full-time Web designer. Or a greatly experienced creative director who hasn’t a clue about the Web.

It’s based on the Populi curriculum in Web Communication Design, which I co-authored with folks from Populi and Pratt Institute of Design. Populi is a business that helps designers and programmers migrate their skills to the Web. This book is based on the Populi curriculum but it’s my book, filtered through me, for better or worse.

It’s a how-to book but it’s also a what-and-why-and-where-is-it-all-going kind of book. It talks about how this medium differs from the one they know, and how it is the same. How Web agencies are structured, and where the designer fits in. It teaches what you need to know to start working at a Web agency now (if that’s what you want to do). But it also explains how the Web is changing, and what you will need to know in the near future.

It’s a unique book that addresses the needs of a market that should have been addressed long ago, but for some reason, never was.

Now, of course, everybody is trying to take their talent OUT of the Web instead of into it, but that will change as the market adjusts.

If you go to a bookstore and check the Web titles, you don’t see books like this. You see lots of books on XML and XSLT and PHP and other stuff that’s wonderful but scary to a designer who’s new to the online world. You see lots of books on using Flash 5 and Dreamweaver and Photoshop but few books like this. It’s a needed book, I think.

I get mail every day from people who’ve read it and liked it, and that is really wonderful to me. Because of the bad economy, it seems that most readers – at least most readers who write to me – are not the initially intended audience of design professionals with limited web experience, but rather my peers (other web designers).

I find that moving and inspiring.