A Resurgence of Tutorial Sites
Everybody gets their start somewhere. My entire entity on the web and the skills that I have as a designer and developer are because of a few things. This is going to be a terrible reflection on past and how ended up “here”.
Some people are naturally drawn to certain things. I’m obviously drawn to my computer chair, but I have an equal passion for sports. An odd combination, but I digress. I remember the first day I had the Internet, and just the awe it induced. Shortly after that I was instantly interested in creating my own website and learned bare bones HTML. It might have been a black page with giant white text saying “My First Website” but it was an accomplishment.
Sometime after that, and all HTML forgotten, I managed to get into graphic design. And by graphic design I mean making cool looking abstract wallpapers in Photoshop. I think sometime around 2002 I had a trial copy of Photoshop 7. I wasn’t exactly net savvy at this point, so it expired. The pinnacle of Photoshop tutorials at this time was Good Tutorials. I’d spend hours just finding cool effects and recreating them on my crappy little PC.
Eventually the whole Kazaa thing got to the harddrive and after reformatting I once again got my trial back. Of course I had no idea that you could just grab a serial key of the ‘net and have it forever, so it expired again. This is where the seed was planted. What I was doing wasn’t particularly creative, but it was fun an produced a myriad of effects I could be proud of at that time.
Fast forward a couple years, I had already designed my first website, but still had no idea to get it from Photoshop to Internet Explorer (oh, yeah). In fact, when I found out that Photoshop is what you used to design them in the first place was a revelation. Go figures that I would learn to code HTML right before the whole CSS uprising. The Slicing Guide taught me how to use sliced Photoshop images and use Dreamweaver to turn them into websites.
Sooner or later I took to finding a way to make things easier, more dynamic and bigger. I came to the conclusion that PHP was what I needed, and shortly found out after I needed MySQL to go with it. At this time I was on a free host with a “blog” that I maintained with static HTML pages. Imagine updating that! Coming into programming showed me a whole new community of tutorial sites.
This got me into paying for hosting and actually having a domain name. I’ll spare the details but I basically got really good at PHP by taking other people’s code and learning to modify it to my needs. Sooner or later I could just write it myself with MySQL to boot. During the development of this theme it was nice to get some MySQL queries in amongst the WordPress stuff just to know I could still do it.
The unfortunate bit of this is that these coding focused tutorial sites were rampant with immiture kids looking for new systems for their Habbo Hotel fansites. It wears on you if you’re serious about getting better and developing websites, and it did. I remember when the main site I learned pretty much everything from was sold for $1000 and I was amazed. It went in the tank from there, but not without starting my freelance “career”.
The Point
I’m going somewhere with this, trust me.
I had basically abandoned these sites because I was focused more on designing and getting myself established and my blog afloat. I did eventually go back for a while but that ended ugly. When you have temperamental kids running your sites, someone as honest as I am can get on your nerves. I went from a forum moderator to a disgruntled member because I spoke my mind. Live and learn - actually, don’t learn. I’m still going to be honest if you ask for my opinion.
The amazing thing about that whole scene is that it’s huge in the form of blogs. Gone are the forums, shoutboxes and poorly designed websites. The TUTS network (PSD, Vector, Net, Audio, etc…) has given me faith in the web’s educational programming.
I’m not about to start a copycat site like the many that have sprung up, but what these sites allow is for newcomers to learn properly. If you read any of the above, it’s obvious I didn’t learn properly, starting off with tables and Dreamweaver. I had no idea what a standard was or how to write CSS on my own. I had to figure all that out on my own by asking stupid questions, but now it’s all out there.
It still kills me how I can have a teacher try to teach like HTML 3 with no CSS at school, yet anyone nowadays can pick up a laptop and be a client side expert in a matter of days.
Leave a comment
Zach Holman
August 30th, 2008 at 10:30 PM
Speaking to some of the broader ideas that you brought up… The part that I find interesting, for better or worse, is the quality of the tutorial marketplace. You mentioned that there’s different phases of people all around… those “script kiddies”, for lack of a better word, who copy and paste crappy PHP or learn Photoshop just to make cool awesome sigs for the sickest 92-person forum out there. And then, yeah, I’ve noticed the growth of PSDTUTS-esque sites over the last two years, too. I think both ends of it are important, really. As much as “real” designers or developers might cringe at signature tutorials or entry-level (and bug-ridden) PHP tutorials, well, that was all of us at some point. Most of those beginners will grow out of it or just find they don’t need to learn anything more, but for every five that don’t carry through there’s one or two that, due to those entry-level tutorials, find something that they love. Hell, I went through Photoshop, Flash, PHP, Java, and a multitude of others on the way to finding out my (current) joy.
So yeah, perhaps not directly addressing any particular point you brought up in your post, but it’s interesting to reflect upon these things sometimes. I get a lot of gripes that center around this issue specifically: “Why do you list all of those ‘crappy’ tutorials for signatures and special effects and junk” — at the same time I get many more emails of thanks for those entry-level tutorials. Hard to find a balance, from my perspective (which makes it *fantastic* that high-quality sites like the TUTS network exist and cater exclusively to those higher-end individuals). Meanwhile I can slip in some of those high quality professional-end tutorials from time to time into my listings as a Trojan horse to get some of those beginner signature-only-please users into some more interesting discourse.
Also, I happen to think that the pinnacle of Photoshop tutorials to this day is still Good-Tutorials.
Alex Fraiser
August 30th, 2008 at 10:39 PM
Great post. I read through the whole thing and I think it’s great how you came along.
About the static blog, I used to do that as well when I could use a little HTML. I know exactly how you feel having to update like that.
And about your last paragraph, I can also relate to that because in an HTML class I took last year my teacher taught us tables, divs and all those other tags yet never mentioned CSS to us. I was already fluent in it, I just think it wasn’t smart not to mention CSS.
Connor Wilson
August 31st, 2008 at 12:15 AM
@Zach — Even as someone that could care less about grunge signature tutorials right now, I think it’s awesome that you keep the entry level stuff, because no matter how snobby someone can be, they started somewhere.
It’s funny how in the end all I ever need is the marquee tool, colours and the odd gradient. I fill boxes with colours and code it, I swear sometimes
Anyway, Zach, what’s it like to have a site like Pixel2Life as competition with their community features? When they released that “green” design ages ago I loved it, but the community revolted and they did away with it. Not that you are lacking in involvement at GT(fair enough, still the pinnacle) but P2L has that forum with aforementioned script kiddies and sign makers running around. Seems like you avoid all that. And in the end it’s that user base that generates the lower quality content. The ‘copypasta’ tutorial that gives you all results and no understanding.
@Alex — It’s actually quite ludicrous. I just shut my mouth and took a 100% on the website project. The other students weren’t exactly eager to learn, and you can imagine their faces when I said “Hyper Text Markup Language”
Zach Holman
August 31st, 2008 at 1:48 AM
@Connor — I’ve been up against “DOOD ADD A FORUM!!!!!!!!!!!!111!!!” for literally five years. There’s a lot of benefits to that, but there are a lot of drawbacks, too. I think I shy away from the idea of site + forum and look to try and embed the community into the site a little further. For now, it’s fairly limited beyond the traditional user account and comments model, but that’ll change and evolve. Teehee.
basement flooring
August 31st, 2008 at 7:11 PM
i have just started learning photoshop and design, and these tutorials have been a real help to me.
Brady Valentino
August 31st, 2008 at 10:44 PM
That’s TT, isn’t it?
Connor Wilson
August 31st, 2008 at 11:32 PM
@Brady — Yep. The “Naresh era” was the educational one for me, and after selling my design from the v4 contest it put me on my way to freelancing.
Marketing
September 1st, 2008 at 7:33 AM
I went through a lot of terrible sites first before I was experienced enough to know whether the info is useful or crap.
Your journey has been pretty much similar to mine, I started off with just baasic html, then CSS, Javascript, AJAX and I know program in Ruby on Rails.
Naresh
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 AM
It was great to vee you write a post about this. My development career started about the same way.
If I know the site you’re talking about when you say:
“”I remember when the main site I learned pretty much everything from was sold for $1000 and I was amazed. It went in the tank from there, but not without starting my freelance “career”.”"
It actually sold for $550, which wasn’t bad for the bad revenue and horrible traffic. It was in the process of taking off before the owner was forced to sell it.
Word on the street is that he’s making a comeback with Trusttec with a new site.
Electrical Creative
September 5th, 2008 at 10:50 AM
When I was starting to learn HTML and photoshop I used to use all the tutorial sites and found some very useful tutorials which I could actually use, but then there were some which I tried but then never found them useful again.
Maria
September 6th, 2008 at 8:09 AM
I am going to study photoshop and design and am quite sure that your informative post will be a great help and guide for me
Quitting The Day Job
September 9th, 2008 at 7:24 AM
Come into the workplace, it is worse. I work as a Web Developer for a decent size, publicly traded company. There are two other web developers on my team. One codes only in tables, has never heard of CSS, and will use anything Microsoft tells him to. The other took 25 hours to add an image and a link to a webpage (yes, 25 hours).
I went to a conference centered around .Net, and one lecture was about CSS. I didn’t know going in it would be the absolute basics, but the teacher asked who would rate themselves an 8 out of 10 in CSS. I was the only one of 200 web developers to raise their hand. After about 20 minutes of the presentation, and the instructor giving WRONG information (like margins default to auto), I just left.
Mary
September 9th, 2008 at 11:58 AM
I think your detailed article will be of great assistance in studying photoshop. telling the truth I am dreaming to get it for about 3 years
James Leicester
September 16th, 2008 at 5:01 AM
Connor, great post, it as almost like a trip down memory lane for me!
Before bare bones HTML, I was Geocities & Homestead back in early 2000-2003!
Whilst I was at University a couple of years ago, I was in a lecture about HTML, and it was painfull. You could tell that the teacher had learnt his take on HTML about 5 years ago, and made no attempt to mention CSS and kept rattling on about using Frames and IFRAMES.
The trouble with SOME teachers/lecturers is that they have up-to-date knowledge of the industry, then decide to take up teaching. Their knowledge then becomes dated and old fashioned because they don’t have the time to practice their skills as they are too busy marking work in their spare time.
Kaitlyn
September 29th, 2008 at 9:48 PM
I love tutorial sites! They have been a real godsend to me.
Mary
October 1st, 2008 at 12:40 PM
So do I, kaithlyn
Nikki
October 1st, 2008 at 7:26 PM
Almost everything I’ve ever learned about a computer was from a tutorial. I love having access to them over the Internet, so I don’t have to fill up my storage shelves at home with tutorials!
Marketing
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:01 AM
You haven’t been posting much lately, where have you been?
Connor Wilson
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:04 PM
Volleyball season. Not exactly having freetime over the past month.
Dana Bordwick
October 13th, 2008 at 6:20 AM
Your story impressed me so much. Great start, great going on, great results!!
Sumesh
October 30th, 2008 at 10:27 PM
One thing I find unfortunate is that inspite of all these tuts sites, very few, if any, give proper advice on how to get started on design, xHTML/CSS, programming, Photoshop etc. It is either experimenting, or asking friends, neither of which are plausible to most people.
NLP Trainer London
November 7th, 2008 at 9:54 PM
I’ve found the great motivator for me is a problem. For example, I need a dynamic site. HTML alone doesn’t give me this. So I learn server-side language and SQL to create dynamic sites. Problems are great motivators. Certainly in the technical world, every problem has a corresponding solution. The by-product of all this is LEARNING STUFF!
Armen Shirvanian
November 17th, 2008 at 10:29 PM
If we kept a record of all the tutorial sites we went through, there would be a huge list that would build up over time. I think that the amount of people following through with tutorial’s follows the 20/80 rule in that probably 20% of tutorial starters get through a given tutorial. Actually, it might be even lower than that, such as in the 10% range. This is probably because most people that run across a tutorial site got their in search of extra knowledge, instead of being in search of the way to solve a problem they already have.
Jon Tiffany
November 29th, 2008 at 7:18 AM
When I first got into computers I spent a fortune on books, then as time went on I found that the same information could easily be found on the web. While there are some great tutorials out there I find that these days there are so many of them its getting harder to find the good ones. Forums are great, but theres nothing worse than people who come along looking for an easy answer an then disapear never to be seen again. The other problem with forums is moderating them, its hard enough having remove all the spam posts let alone keeping it all friendly and stopping the flame wars!
Marketing
December 1st, 2008 at 9:16 AM
Wow, seems like everyone has an interesting story to tell about how they got to where they are. Very inspirational.
Office space
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:42 PM
What a transition in life? Well am not surprise, Great post. I read through the whole thing and I think it’s great how you came along. RSS your blog as well. Keep it up.
Ed Kohler
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:24 PM
Great stuff. We do need more tutorials on the web who can take people through transitions between different levels of technology. Help them understand the benefits and justify the time it takes to get up to speed.
Las Vegas Guy
January 4th, 2009 at 7:35 PM
Started off with a template site that was very, very limited. Picked up a book on html, started hanging out in forums and then moved on to a Drupal site. Now I have that, plus a couple of WP sites and am learning the ins and outs. I do wish there were more tutorials out there.
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