Today I won my first professional independent web design contract. I’ve worked (and continue to work) as a web designer at companies before, and done volunteer projects. But this is the first substantial work for which I have found, researched, mocked-up, bid, and convinced someone else to pay me directly. It feels liberating. And it brings back wonderful memories of the half of my life I’ve now spent making web sites.

I started in 1998, when I was 12, and it seemed like complete voodoo. Today there are all sorts of books and tools to show you the source code behind all sorts of beautiful web sites. But in 1998 the book selection was limited. If you wanted to know how a web site worked, you could click “view source” in Internet Explorer 4, and it would spit out some indecipherable text into Notepad. And if, heaven forbid, the site had been designed on a Mac or Unix machine, the whole contents would be printed on a single, extremely long and incomprehensible line.

I remember thinking Microsoft and Webmonkey had the coolest web sites, because they had these menus that appeared and disappeared as you clicked or moused over certain areas. I thought: forget plain text, this dynamic stuff is for me. So I read about everything I could find on web design: header tags, tables, spacer gifs, everything. But no one said anything about dynamic pop-out menus. So I thought: geez, these serious programmers at Microsoft and Webmonkey must have come up with some trick no one else knew about. And since I’ve just read everything about web design, and I’m pretty smart for a 12-year-old, and I found the “view source” option in Internet Explorer, I’ll just go figure out how they did it and charge other people to do it for their sites.

So I get the source for the Webmonkey web site, and it’s all on one line. No problem, just copy it into a Word document and start adding line breaks, formatting, whatever it takes until I understand it. And most of it is completely sensible: headers, table tags, spacer gifs, font declarations. All stuff I know, nothing magic. But there was one little thing I didn’t understand, and I figured: hey, if there is one bit of magic on the site that I don’t know how to reproduce, and only one thing in the source code that I don’t understand, then clearly they line up, right? It must be this one mysterious bit of the source that causes the one mysterious bit of the page. So, by process of logical reasoning, I came to the only conclusion possible–

The dynamic menus must be caused by the magic incantation:  

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It turns out all this does is insert a space into the document. In text, you can just type a plain space, but when you want multiple spaces in a row or content that fills out space but doesn’t display, you have to manually write  

Thankfully, it’s ten years later and I know a lot more. I now am actually employed as a JavaScript programmer (which is, by the way, what really made the menus work), I’ve read a lot more (and better) books on web design and coding, and I even consider myself pretty good. But I have the nagging feeling that I’ve missed something, that a real professional would know more than this, be able to do more than this. Now that knowledge about web design is so available, there aren’t enough secrets left to make us feel like masters.

Then, last week, our intern came to me with a broken layout.

“I don’t understand why this won’t line up,” she said, “I don’t want any content in the left column, but it should still take up the normal width, right?” And she showed me what she had:

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“Hmm,” I said, “I can fix it, but this is a little expert trick you won’t understand:”

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