I had two conversations with talented ad creatives yesterday that reminded me of how far maintaining this blog and my other sites have taken me in the last year. The first was about SEO and the second was about proficiency with development. Neither one of them had been expected to have any technical expertise until they were laid off last year and started job hunting. Improving my skill set is something I’ve been passionate about on in the last couple years – obviously I have good reason.

Working with the Web began for me professionally in 1996 while writing the first website and banners ads for a car company. I’ve continued to work on digital assignments since. Writing possibly hundreds of sites, thousands of banner ads, and various web components to advertising campaigns since. I even had a blogger blog and a WordPress.com blog for awhile. But I never had a reason to get too involved in the technical side of things till I began this self-hosted blog.

It was having this blog that caused me to start thinking about all of the things that I took for granted when someone else was doing them. SEO, CSS, analytics and just getting things to function the way you want them too. It’s also allowed to be experiment with tools, like those neat buttons at the top and bottom of this post.

Where am I going with this? Reading blogs is a great way to gain useful information, be exposed to different things, and have a good laugh. But actively maintaining a blog will build a deeper understanding of how things actually work. And may also help you develop some marketable skills before you really, really need them.

Posted on: March 26, 2010, by : Jimmy Gilmore