We Can Get There From Here: making a badass web

In Culture, Web Development, Writing on 3 November 2009 with no comments

My arti­cle, You Can Get There From Here: Websites for learn­ers is live today on A List Apart.

For var­i­ous rea­sons, this arti­cle was a long time com­ing. I started writ­ing it over a year and a half ago, but I just couldn’t spit out what I was try­ing to say. Every incar­na­tion of the arti­cle either turned into a rant about how the web indus­try has failed every­one who isn’t mak­ing com­mer­cial web­sites, or it got unwieldy and lengthy enough to be a small book.

The folks at ALA waited patiently. They offered gen­tle guid­ance. Krista Stevens, bless her heart, gave me the insight that prob­a­bly allowed me to fin­ish the arti­cle with­out giv­ing up. Yet still another month or two passed with­out the arti­cle com­ing to fruition.

Finally, I told myself enough was enough. Get the god­damned arti­cle fin­ished already.

And finally, I did.

Of the three arti­cles I’ve writ­ten for A List Apart, I think this one is my favorite. Not because it’s my best (I don’t think it is; there are still aspects of the piece I’m not com­pletely happy with) but because it speaks to some­thing I feel very strongly about: do-it-yourself, mav­er­ick edu­ca­tion. So many of us look to the web to edu­cate our­selves on top­ics from home­school­ing to can­cer. And if the web isn’t friendly to us, we miss out, indi­vid­u­ally and cul­tur­ally. We could be learn­ing so much more. We could be hav­ing much bet­ter learn­ing expe­ri­ences than we are.

In fact, the basic prin­ci­ples that under­lie my beliefs about how the web should be are the very prin­ci­ples I built All’s Fair in Love & War upon. That web­site was specif­i­cally designed to be dis­cov­er­able. And as the site and the nar­ra­tive grows, so too will its discoverability.

I still think the web indus­try has largely failed the non-commercial web. Those who cre­ate web­sites to show­case beauty, or to edu­cate, or to enter­tain have been given the same advice about “how to make a good inter­net” as web­sites that want to sell you some­thing. But mar­ket­ing advice, as well-intentioned as it may be, isn’t good enough for web­sites whose pri­mary pur­pose is to con­tribute some­thing mean­ing­ful to our cul­ture. What advice do we have for those web cre­ators? What advice does the indus­try have for those who aren’t try­ing as their pri­mary goal to increase their ad rev­enue or get their cus­tomer to make it through the check out process?

And so we’ve failed thus far. But we are doing bet­ter. Content—the stuff peo­ple, in the­ory, come to your web­site look­ing for—is finally get­ting some action due to the hard work of peo­ple like Kristina Halvorson who travel the world, lit­er­ally, spread­ing the good news about why you need to love your con­tent. And that’s fan­tas­tic. It’s a giant step in the right direction.

But it’s not enough. We’re still not doing enough. As I wrote in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, “Making Badass Free Culture on the Web”, we have a long way to go to make the inter­net I dream of: a web that is rich, dis­cov­er­able, chal­leng­ing, enlight­en­ing, fun, and beautiful.

We can get there from here. But we have to work to get there.

Illustration: © Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

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