(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)
I’m going to pounce on this “dumb it down” notion. I don’t like it and I’m going to tell you why.
But first, the back story…
In my never-ending quest to bring you the very best of the web, I was out poking around and came across Website Optimization.
Actually, I’m fibbing a little, I jumped there from somebody’s blog post, email or newsletter, but I forget now who sent me there (let me know, I’ll link to you). But I was trolling around before then. I’m sure of it.
Website Optimization is 1. a web site, and 2. an O’Reilly book.
The company behind the website will fix you up, make your website blaze with speed. If you’re in the Fortune 500.
For the rest of us, there’s the book.
The book is one of those famous O’Reilly paperback books with the animal on the cover, and probably weighs 2 lbs.
Costs $39.95. About right.
Now I could read through the book in a couple of months, grab a few servers from Rackspace, and make some blazing websites.
But what about you?
If you started into it, you might feel a little overwhelmed. Website Optimization is some rich material.
What you need is exactly those parts which apply to you and your blog.
How do you get those parts?
You either take the time to sort it all out yourself, or, you purchase the knowledge, all chunked down into pieces exactly the right size to smarten you up.
It’s not dumbing you down
It really is smartening you up.
When you learn, you get smarter, but the teacher doesn’t get any dumber. In fact, from my experience, the teacher gets smarter too!
So why do they call it “dumbing down.”
I don’t know. But I don’t like it.
Stick around Website In A Weekend more than a couple of days, I guarantee you will get smartened up.
It’s what I do.
I hope you feel smarter already!
(And buy my stuff, we’ll both get smarter the more I make of it.)
Hey Dave, I’m new to your blog and like it a lot so far. Gonna keep reading and hopefully smarten up some!
.-= Patrick Toerner´s last blog ..$1,000 a Month From a Minisite =-.
Patrick, thanks for stopping by.
Let me know what you would like to see, what I can do to help you out.
Dumbing down… Seriously, I hate that phrase. Mostly because when it’s used to describe breaking things down into more manageable chunks other people latch on to it and really ‘dumb down’ the language used too. Possibly one of my main hates. Not ‘pet peeves’ actual hate.
Especially when they take that principle and apply it to coursework. Don’t know about anyone else, but when I’m learning something I want the truth to be complete, accurate, and relevant. In schools here they start you with one set of knowledge, then a year later say ‘by the way, that way’s nonsense’ and give you another set, and so on. College isn’t so bad, but come on, seriously?
Are things so hard that they can’t just spend the time teaching you properly?
Further it’s insulting to your audience. Fair enough, if you’re going to teach something basic go right ahead, because it won’t be basic for everyone. That’s fine, and I’ve no issues there (do it myself after all). The issue comes when you teach something basic and start emitting large chunks of relevant information because you think it’ll go right over their heads.
This whole system of writing for primary school students is probably causing some confusion too; The language might be better suited to that level, but there’s going to be jargon, there’s going to be higher level content, there’s going to be thought processes that exceed what a five year old can manage. Your audience isn’t five.
Further, I’m not sure I even agree with that ‘write at a basic level’ methodology anyway. Why not write for college students? Why not write for graduates? Depends on your audience I guess, certainly you’ll reach more people with simpler language. Sometimes that isn’t the point though. On the other side, you can talk about complicated things without being complicated; that isn’t dumbing it down either, that’s just making it accessible.
I think my dislike of the premise comes down to this whole movement away from using the correct word and substituting it instead with the ‘convenient’ or ‘easy’ word. Or text speak. Seriously?
Anyway, that’s a bit of a diversion from the point you were making, sorry about that lol (lol isn’t text speak, I swear). Couldn’t resist.
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Friday: Now with added Game and Awesome =-.
Don’t get me started!
I could rant off of every one of your paragraphs, easily.
Overall, you have put your finger on exactly the quandary I have when creating products. My choices are:
1. Research and write something definitive. I’d say canonical, but I’m going defer to Darren for that. He’s the pope, as it were.
2. “Dumb it down” for lack of a better way to put it.
There’s got to be a middle way.
What I’m facing right now: Blog Post Engineering weighs in about 45 pages or so, with about 30 pages of real meat hung of the other 15 pages of structure. It has a glossary, table of contents, etc.
I could turn this into 200 pages very easily by
1. Using Palatino instead of Times New Roman
2. 11 or 12 pt instead of 10 point font size.
3. Add pictures of coffee cups and stuff.
4. Increasing margin width.
5. Making section headers larger.
6. Increase lead and line skip everywhere.
7. A load more other tricks I learned (and finally discarded from 11 years of higher education).
What would be the point?
As it’s constructed right now, it’s easy to print out and put in binder for reference. Dense material means you can find stuff you’re looking for instead of paging all around.
It would be easy if I didn’t care. But for some reason, I have this compulsion to really help people!
I think I need to raise my prices.
Sounds like you should!
Admittedly there’s a time and place for pretty pictures to move things along, that’s less of an issue for me, but padding rubs me the wrong way (unless it has a use, or is very entertaining).
Definitive anything is going to be heavy, because its going to be full of the information you need. If you then go on and make smaller ones with more padding and steps to make it easier to understand that’s your perogative and it’d appeal to a different set of people.
With the internet there’s lots of information right there; what disturbs me a little is the amount of time and attention we give it (lots of glances rather than reading through just one thing and doing it), how we implement it (or not), and this trend towards ‘lets make it easier for absolutely everyone to understand *insert advanced topic here*’. Maybe that makes me elitist, but I figure that by the time you’re studying something that advanced you don’t need the fluff.
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Friday: Now with added Game and Awesome =-.
The point is I don’t want the fluff.
I get more out of one page of Halmo’s “Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces” than I do out of a shelf of other books on linear algebra. And trust me, I do have a shelf on linear algebra.
While it’s on my mind, I have my copy of Foley and van Dam, and you should too.
Foley and van Dam? I’ve heard of Foley (assuming its the same guy) but I do believe a trip to Google is in order. Ooohhh, yea I knew about those, just didn’t click with the names (not great at names in general); don’t have a copy yet but its on my list.
Anyway, some days I want fluff – but I don’t trick myself into reading things to learn on those days. That’s what webcomics and so on are for.
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Friday: Now with added Game and Awesome =-.
No, no more books! I love to read, but this stuff is never interesting, always blurs on the pages, and leaves me feeling ever so lacking in so many ways [yes, I say 'so' a lot]. Snippets and snack-sized bites works wonders without all the cluttering of words. That’s not dumbing it down, but tweaking out the fluff.
Now to find a few simple explanations of CSS so I can finally do some tweaking of my own. Any recommendations?
.-= Anne Bender´s last blog ..writing prompt 50 =-.
Anne, CSS -> O’Reilly.
But it’s dense.
Between that and doing a lot of reverse engineering, I don’t know any way to learn it without putting a lot of thought into it.
I learn well through examples. Maybe I haven’t found the right one. Maybe I should start by picking apart one of those plug-ins and seeing what happens. Trial and error works, too.
You know maybe you should check out Smashing Magazine; they run CSS specials sometimes that link you to other tutorials they find useful. They’re also really easy to understand most of the time and explain things clearly.
Worth a look maybe.
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Friday: Now with added Game and Awesome =-.
Thank you, Heather. I’ll check it out. I’m not one to let a little difficulty and near-impossibility stop me. Besides, it’s not like I want to rewrite the internet just create a post template. There has got to be something to use as a guide for such things.
http://www.violetminded.com/
Start here: http://website-in-a-weekend.net/extending-wordpress/teach-css-wordpress/
Let me know how I can extend it.
WordPress is a pretty good platform for learning.
Reverse engineering is how I learn most things these days.
I poke at the source, then grab as much of the CSS and Javascript as I can find on the server, then set up experiments to figure out what’s going on.
Takes time.
Simple is not the same as easy.
Maybe simple was the wrong choice of words. I can’t wrap my brain around CSS like I can with HTML. Yet, I don’t really want all the technical guru stuff since I am not, a guru, that is. There are a few things I would like to do, but I don’t understand the premise. What it really comes down to is I want to know how it ticks, in plain English please.
CSS in plain English is not possible.
The concept of the “cascade” isn’t too difficult, but the number of rules and exceptions implementing CSS make it very difficult to master for some people. Like me for example.
I swear, I’d rather code symplectic integrators in C or C++ than master CSS. (Fun work if you can get it)
Part of the problem isn’t technical. The W3C has no power to enforce. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and now Google all have vested interests in breaking other browsers. Doesn’t matter what they say publicly, they ARE locked in a battle for future domination of your desktop.
So the implementation of features varies across browsers, and the correctness of implementation also varies.
CSS isn’t like HTML where you can sort of get the hang of it as you go. Most people, including me, have to set up some experiments to see how things actually behave, then compare the behavior with what the spec says ought to be the behavior.
I say this as I’ve spent the last couple of hours pounding on some of my own CSS.
Once I can outsource all of it, I will, trust me.
There isn’t any shortcut on it. WordPress is more or less standards compliant (ok, less, not in ways that really matter), so you’re pretty well forced to learn how to Do It Right.
A better question: why is this important?
Look how well I’m doing here with a less-then-optimal design. I touch as a little of the CSS as possible. Makes it easier to upgrade, keeps me theme independent.
On the other hand, don’t you know high school kids that would work cheap? They have the time and lack of responsibility to be able to deep focus on it.
If you *really* need to learn it, I’d recommend either:
1. Take a class at the local community college, or
2. Budget say, 250 hours of time over the next 3 months and dig in (it really does take time, there aren’t any shortcuts).
3. Both.
I could go on, need to get back after it.
That was my epiphany last night, about other things, but it applies here. Lots of formulas are really simple but applying them is hard. Making things simple for readers can be difficult – but valuable. Making things simple doesn’t necessarily make things easy, though. The work part might be simple – just do it! – but it is rarely easy.
Making things simple for readers is brutally hard work!
I’m working on WW7 (Scannability) right now. Added some exercises. It’s time consuming, nitpicky. Luckily I like doing it. Pricing starts higher, $1.99 for this one.
Just raised the price on everything else too.
It’s crazy and I don’t get it. People complain about purchasing because “everything is free” but they have all this free stuff and they don’t do anything with it!
I think Frank Kern has a point: Attract people willing to take action, for real. Charge a lot of money. He sure isn’t working any harder than I am!
I agree. You SHOULD charge more. Please do.
It’s coming. Soon.
I like books because they usually contain complete information and are great to refer back to. I don’t like trying the find the small piece of information that I really need iI because the index is lousy or I don’t know what the right name for the information I seek is. Dumbing down is eliminating information to make it easy for the student and teacher – like our public schools. What I think you do is capture small pieces of the total picture and cover them succinctly and with enough detail to convey understanding of the process. And darn, just because I keep deferring the purchase of your materials waiting for sometime when I am not feeling overburdened, you go and double the price. By the time I have time to learn something, I won’t be able to afford your.
.-= Ralph´s last blog ..Saturday Bonus =-.
Well, if you’re a Hero and on the Weekender mailing list, you already got WW1 in appreciation for helping out with getting the Facebook page name reserved.
My recommendation: Get WW2 and enjoy free upgrades as I continue to refine and extend the series. And get WW7 on writing scannable blog posts when it comes out sometime in the next week or two.
Warning: these tiny little 2 pages will make you *work,* but they will _smarten_ you up… for less than the price of a latte!
I could use some smartening up.
Also, the ability to present complicated stuff in a simple way is an elegant skill to have.
.-= Deacon´s last blog ..I’m a Printmaker, Not an Artist =-.
I hope I have improved on this over the last year.
Let me know if you find anything a little vague, or too telegraphic.
I’ve noticed improvement. Telegraphic is fine in our off-band conversations though.
.-= Deacon´s last blog ..I’m a Printmaker, Not an Artist =-.
Hey Dave! I’m all for smartening up … I guess there is an audience for everything but given my druthers I’druther both get smarter and attract people who are.
Oh yes… I do get smarter with all your material. Raising prices might get you more purchases. I know that is counter intuitive but go figure, its a marketing 101 thing.
.-= Valentina´s last blog ..The Week That Was: Mar 21-27 =-.
Prices are creeping up.
At this point I have to have faith in myself and my future customers, and just grind out product.
Will have a discount code in today’s newsletter =)
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Why Are You Here? How Did You Get Here? And What Are You Going to Do About It? =-.
PS… having picked up the Smarten Up banner … I’m with you re outsourcing techie type stuff (and that CSS sounds ghastly … I have looked at in on my own blogs and just as quickly as having arrived there, left) asap with the caveat that at least I should have some basic knowledge or know what it is that I am really outsourcing.
.-= Valentina´s last blog ..The Week That Was: Mar 21-27 =-.
Exactly. I have the outline for a lengthy article on this, along the lines of “How to Start In the 21st…” whoa… I just got the title… thanks for that.
I need to do a bunch of drawing, which is holding me up.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..The Starfish Principle – Trying counts as success =-.
I am with you, “dumb it down” annoys the hell out of me and you can add “reaching out to others” to my list of things I don’t like. I do like Heather’s passion in her response :)
.-= Extreme John´s last blog ..UFC 111 Recap =-.
John, it’s time for you to seriously think about 9 figs. Seriously. You have the chops, man.
Good points here, you don’t have to dumb down everything, just make your writing better so more people can understand. People can do more than they think they can, I constantly am telling my 6 year old that he can do something that he asks me to do. If he puts a little effort into it, he can do lots of things and then he thinks he is the greatest thing in the world. it is fun to see.
.-= Justin Matthews´s last blog ..Our Fighting Men, Our Peace of Mind. =-.
People CAN do more than they think they can… usually when they aren’t thinking so much about how they can’t do it.
I’d like to keep that sort of inspiration alive and growing here.