| Making Web Design "Tons" of Fun |
|
By Glenn Wilkins, Barrie Advance, August 21 2006 Local author achieves dream with Ten Ton Dreamweaver. For Geoff Blake, it all started at a five-day seminar in Calgary. The Barrie-based freelance web wizard was teaching folks anxious to start up their own web pages, and many were impressed with his laid-back, entertaining style of imparting his wisdom, so much so that, at the end of the session, a woman stopped and asked him when he was putting out the textbook from the course. Blake had to confess to her that there was no textbook, but simultaneously, a buzzer went off in his head, and continued to sound all through the flight home. Geoff managed to quiet the buzzer by
compiling all the things he disliked about web “I thought the layout of the book should be that of a movie magazine, announcing all the features on the front,” the author of Ten Ton Dreamweaver tells The Advance. He also thought it should be humorous, which is why there’s a page suggesting other uses for the book. “Things like making the pages into paper airplanes, into a helmet, paper towels, that sort of thing.” But seriously, the Dreamweaver market
remains a fairly small and specialized one, (As an example, one company from which Blake shops—a well-known furniture chain store—also has a website,
but the site is so dull, dry and barren-looking as to be a turnoff. “Why go to their site when you can make use of
their catalogue?” Blake says. He believes the way the site is kept betrays a fundamental disconnect between what Ten Ton Dreamweaver debuted on bookshelves in February, and Blake is pleased with the reception thus far, most people saying the book has lent them confidence to continue on with building and improving their sites, when they otherwise never would. Strangely enough, though, Blake says the book has garnered better reception in the States than in Canada. “I’ve heard from the design community in Chicago, in Tennessee, even from a guy in Florida.” Encouraged by the response, Blake has a Ten Ton Flash near completion, to be ready for a Christmas release date, to be followed up by Ten Ton Photoshop and Ten Ton Illustrator. Why Ten Ton, he is asked? Is this fairly slim web guru obsessed with weight? Not at all. “I’m giving people the big picture, the gross, of what software is all about, not the net. So ‘Ten Ton’ is ‘Not Net” spelled backwards.”
|