Expert or Dabbler?
On October 17, 2004 I did something that only 1% of people in Americas ever do. I ran a marathon. That’s 26.2 miles. Most of you would call me crazy, but the marathon was a great experience for me. I worked together with a team — my sisters — to train my body and prepare my mind for the struggle of completing a marathon. No one on my team would be classified as a “runner” by most normal standards. I’d only begun my running hobby a few years earlier when I was convinced to run on my college’s cross country team. My sisters were even later running hobbyists than me. Our training workouts were found on the Internet. We read some books and magazines about nutrition and marathoning. And then we got started. Certainly we weren’t experts, but we got the job done, albeit through soreness and slowness.
Since our marathon we’ve continued to dabble in our running hobby. A race here and there, some cross training, etc. I haven’t gotten any better and maybe I’ve gotten worse. But, that’s okay for me. While I might run a marathon again, it’s not about the sport for me. It’s more like a hobby. I can’t dedicate my life to training — do you know how much time it take to seriously train for a marathon? I’ll leave training plans and nutrition guides to the people who are dedicated to that — the trainers and the dietitians. I enjoy running and it is good for my health, so I’ll keep it up as a hobby, but I’m not a running professional. I’m a web developer, that’s my profession.
I see a parallel between my interest in running and the interest I’ve seen other people take in building websites. Sometimes for one reason or another people begin to play around with technology. Maybe they find information online, maybe they read a book, maybe they even take an HTML course! One way or another, like I did with running, they find out they can build a website. Registering a domain name, getting a hosting account setup and throwing together some HTML isn’t terribly difficult. It takes some effort and some time, but with a good book or online article and a few days, lots of people can do it. Just like I could run a marathon. The website probably won’t win any awards, but it’ll be out there for the world to see and that’s an accomplishment.
As a web developer, it doesn’t bother me to see people dabbling around and putting together quick-and-dirty sites for themselves. Certainly these people aren’t experts though, they’re just hobbyists. They’re not the type of people you’d ask to develop a website for your business…or are they? As strange as it seems, we still come across some businesses who “have a friend” that can make a website for them for free. Could you imagine someone hiring me to coach just because I’m a running hobbyist? My personal experience doesn’t qualify me to coach — I simply don’t know enough about running to lead a team to success. Many times we see websites that are just thrown together by a dabbler without professional web development knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, these websites rarely achieve any meaningful business goals. Worse yet, dabblers usually move on to other interests (like their real jobs) and leave the website owner without any way to maintain the website.
If your business needs a website that works for your company, you need to find a professional to help you. ArrowQuick has years of experience in the web development business, and we pride ourselves on our customer service and knowledge of the ever-changing web. If you just want a quick-and-dirty site, then it’s fine to use a dabbler. If you want more, use a professional.
