"By spreading yourself thinner (learning more languages) do you dilute your focus too much?"

Now I understand there are people out there who don't just design websites but take on the building process without much coding knowledge if any, and that's a contentious thing in itself. In a bigger team of people, your designer can work with others that have coding knowledge and there is little point in duplicating the skills the team already has access to, but how about the freelancer?

We've always felt that some knowledge is pretty much vital when taking on the website of someone else's business and accepting payment for doing the job. There are so many pitfalls that can be avoided from some knowledge particularly of the basic structure of an HTML document, and the contents of a CSS file. We are not stating that someone who can't hand-code a site can't build one, I've personally seen too many good sites put together by people who aren't proficient coders to say that, but those neglecting to understand what type of things the head of the document usually has in it and the like, are not taking their job seriously enough for my money.

For our thoughts, even that's not enough, and I am happy enough coding HTML in a text editor (Espresso on the Mac is our current favourite) and also CSS, but that's not the end of modern web pages is it? How many web pages out there, are built without any inclusion of javascript? Not exactly a high percentage. OK, so it is commonly said amongst developers that pages including javascript should function without the javascript running, so you could claim that it's not quite as deep in the 'core' of web pages, it's just additional 'behaviour', but is that just taking the easy way out?

I have been working on my javascript knowledge of late, and with how different this is as a language, I'm beginning to wonder what good I'm doing for myself. I have used many javascript 'plugins' without knowing any javascript code over a number of years, relying on plugins based on libraries like jQuery to give us the results needed by only understanding how to tie this into the HTML document. Does understanding the basic syntax of javascript really help here? Not so far to be honest. This ends up feeling like you're spending time knowing how to make a clock when all you want is to wind it up and tell the time.

This just sounds like wasting a little time perhaps, but by doing this are you trying to squash too much into your headspace and time? Are you going to weaken your focus on what you do really well? After all, no-one can be everything to everyone.

That's the concern here, and while I'll be pushing on with this for a little while yet, we're keeping aware of this as I go along. I am responsible for a lot of the visual design and layout we have to do (far less often photography and copywriting etc) and must make sure none of this focus suffers as I try and move forward in any other areas. We can't afford any weakening as a small outfit in what is working for us to add something that we can't see any benefit from as yet.

As the work into web programming languages deepens to PHP too, we will keep up to date on here as to what we feel the consequences are.

Please leave comments as to how you all feel about this, as I'm sure it's very different for different folks. While I'm far from worried about diving into coding, it's amazing how different languages feel like they do or don't work with your head/thinking, and HTML has always felt easy, and javascript really not here.

Best,

Karn @ WebKarnage