Join in the Community
Careful! This post is looking a little old and could be inaccurate in many, many ways
In the web design industry you’ll probably find that you can divide the workforce into two camps; those that follow the community and those that don’t. The same I know exists in the SEO industry too. Unfortunately for me I only discovered the web design community after graduating University, but since then it’s has helped me improve the work I produce immensely.
Unfortunately given the poor standard of work that is still being released onto the web it does appear that some have let the community pass them by. This could either be ignorance or a desire to not get involved, simply happy to go to work and be paid at the end of the month.
It does surprise me that some people do wish to work in this manner. Of course in most other industries this is the norm with communities seemingly working at a slower pace or simply not existing at all. I don’t imagine there is a SXSW for bin men? But for the web I think the community is so much a part of what being a web designer is all about.
We simply can’t force people to integrate into our community if they do not wish, given the strong opinions and infighting that occurs at times I think that sometimes it’s best to stay away but the reason our community exists cannot be forgotten. This reason is due to the speed and frequency our industry changes and develops, forever changing the way we work and the sites we produce. It’s this speed of change that has made the community such a large part of our working day and why we have developed this thirst of information. We grab any new technology that has allowed us to better consume this flow of information this is why we have blogs, RSS feeds and ultimately Twitter.
So if you’re not part of the community and you’re reading this then I recommend you definitely get involved as it’s certainly helped improve the work I’ve produced over the past 3 years. Even if you don’t want to get involved in the conversations that occur you can still subscribe to RSS feed and follow people on twitter, so long as you can get the information to help you it doesn’t matter if you get involved but it sure makes the experience much better.