Sometimes, we lose track of the beginners. There’s so much information to stay on top of that gets crammed into our minds as web developers, that we sometimes forget where we came from. Thankfully, it’s easy to remind ourselves by offering our time and help to those who are new to the business. Personally, I answer questions over at Experts Exchange when I have free time. There are plenty of other forums or newgroups where one can offer assistence as well.
The quality of questions at EE range from those just starting out, to those needing assistance with some pretty high level stuff. While the high level stuff is fun to assist with, it’s the ones who are just starting out that usually need the help the most. You’ll see a lot of questions about layouts that don’t work in different browsers, CSS that is doing funny things, and people who just really don’t have a good grasp on the web technologies and what they all do.
A big part of helping some of these folks is the teaching aspect that goes along with it. Rather than simply providing a code fix, you can explain to them why they should be doing something a certain way. Why they should be using CSS instead of tables for their layouts, why HTML is different than ASP or PHP, why their should run their site through the validator. A lot of these folks might not care, but if you can impart some knowledge to those that do, you can help the future of the web. You can not only be responsible for making your own web sites better, you can help others make their betters as well.
A lot of questions get asked over and over again, and I’ll hopefully start addressing a few of those in some articles here on the site. One of the big issues I’ve noticed lately are people with layout issues between browsers that are being caused by invalid code and a lack of a DOCTYPE, so stay tuned for the first of the series - “Don’t forget your DOCTYPE!”