Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

A few weeks ago, I had the following conversation regarding a site I designed:

“Oh wow. You designed the whole site yourself?”

“Yup.”

“You use Dreamweaver for that?”

“No. Photoshop and a text editor.”

This is an incredibly revealing conversation, but to understand why, we need to step back to, say, 1996. Bill Clinton is in the White House, AOL is popular, Weird Al Yankovic has a smash hit in “Amish Paradise”, and my family owns exactly one computer, housed in our perpetually frigid basement. My interest in computer-generated special effects is at its height. My dad takes me to our local computer store—I think it was called Egghead Computers—to see if they have anything in stock that will feed my interest. The surprisingly knowledgeable clerk informs me that the kind of software used in the motion picture industry costs at least $1,500. This is far more than my family can afford, to say nothing of how our aging Hewlett Packard would (or more likely, wouldn’t) handle the program.

The clerk does, however, have a reasonable alternative: Visual Reality, a software suite not nearly as powerful as what they use in Hollywood, but good enough to give me a taste of how it all works. It was $200 well spent. I can’t count the number of hours I clocked with those programs. Often the only thing that interrupted me was a desire to restore feeling in my fingers, which inevitably went numb from the cold basement. Either that or dad wanted to check the NHL standings.

I would eventually move on to more capable programs, but ultimately I did not travel the path of Ryan Wieber. There were many barriers that prevented me from being as good as I wanted to be in 3D. I didn’t have any background in traditional art, my computer was never quite powerful enough to let me work efficiently, and I was trying to learn extremely complex software through unofficial channels. I had a lot of fun producing a cool-looking wallpaper now and then, but the general feeling was: What I am doing is not what they are doing (they being the professionals). There was a barrier that I simply couldn’t cross.

One last bit of time travel before we return to the present. In 1988, Jordan Mechner developed a game called Prince of Persia (perhaps you’ve heard of it?) using his Apple II. Years later, Mechner would remark—and unfortunately I can only paraphrase him—that it was exciting to be working with the same tools that the “professional” game developers were using, right there on his Apple II.

Back to my life. Around the same time that I got into 3D, I also discovered HTML. Unlike the world of 3D graphics, there were no barriers between what I was doing and what they were doing. This is still true today. The internet of 2009 may be user-generated, Facebooked, Ajaxed, monetized, and 2.0-ified, but the basic tools are available to anyone who wants them. The web is built on HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP. All of these technologies are available for free. You don’t have to spend money on compilers and developer fees. The internet is so full of tips and tutorials on how to code a webpage that you don’t even have to spend money on books if you don’t want to. All you need is sufficient interest. The tools are there for the taking. There is nothing stopping you.

That, for me, is the most appealing part of the whole web thing. Anyone can do this. Open up a text editor, crop some images, upload a video to Youtube, write something on Blogger, and you can be a creator. The real challenge, then, is to do it well.