Don’t Forget Your Mouthpiece

I first tried to teach myself HTML during a comfortable but dull Christmas holiday at my parents’ house about 6 years ago. I was captivated by the underlying simplicity of it all, but painfully aware my skills were limited compared to the burgeoning array of clever design that was appearing on the Web in those days. Accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, separation of content from presentation meant nothing to me - in fact I couldn’t even now tell you how much of an issue they were to anyone else at that time. I just remember thinking it all looked very swanky compared to my spartan non-CSS efforts.

I dabbled occasionally after that, but the teeny-weeny issue of needing to learn to play the horn properly before I graduated got in the way of any serious extra-curricular activity. Subsequent to that was the period of severe impoverishment familiar to many freelance musos fresh out of college, which necessitated forgoing my weekly Internet cafe budget in favour of frivolous luxuries like food and rent, and taking my job at the Barbican, which has the incredible ability to eat up all your time in an entirely non-constructive way, whilst leaving you with not that much money to show for it.

Anyway, by 2003 I had established myself in the business enough to feel reasonably calm about forking out for a decent computer. At that stage, I wanted it mainly for doing arrangements on Sibelius, although truthfully it just joined golf and my DVD collection as a compelling distraction from practising.

At the same time, I was edging towards the view that freelance horn playing would not be viable as a sole long-term career option for a whole lot longer. I had started teaching for 3-4 hours a week, which was enjoyable enough but I wasn’t sure if a) I was any good at it, and b) whether my brain or my patience could cope with doing enough of it to pay a mortgage. I knew of several colleagues who were moving into diverse sidelines including plumbing, plastering, driving instruction, property and whatever, and at this point I began to have the vague idea of doing something similar. It was whilst looking at OU courses vaguely related to the arts that I came across the OU’s introductory Design and the Web course. This course is more to do with design than any serious Web authoring, but it whetted my appetite enough to sign up for the Certificate in Web Applications Development.

I am now in the middle of the second part of this course (client-side scripting) and am continually amazed by the ingenuity that goes into the various protocols and mark-up languages that we use. (In particular, IMHO the sheer cleverness of whoever came up with CSS deserves a medal). I definitely want to be involved with web design to some extent, but the question that started to bug me a few weeks ago was exactly to what extent.

I definitely don’t want to jack in the horn completely (I still love it as much as I did when I was playing with local amateur and youth orchestras) but equally I can’t bank on having any kind of future with it. The same, to be honest, goes for web design. So far I haven’t built sites of any great size or complexity, so I don’t know if I’m cut out for it, or even whether I might enjoy doing it 24/7.

So, here’s the plan. I’ve got myself a reseller account with ehostpros.com, which is cheap enough for me to pay for myself for a while. I’m using it to host my personal site and eventually, sites for my musical enterprises and fledgling web design studio. In addition to this, I’m planning to set up half a dozen or so sites for family, friends and acquaintances, which ideally will not need to be dynamic, PHP or SQL or anything else-driven in the short term, and will not require too much updating or maintenance. I’ll charge them a competitive hosting fee and do the initial design for free, on the understanding that I’m still feeling my way and I might have to suddenly whack up the hosting rates if the budget server proves not to be up to the job.

All this means I’ll be able to get my feet wet in the world of web design and hosting, develop a (hopefully) decent portfolio, get used to a pattern of working on a new site, cover my overheads for hosting, and, most importantly, still have time to try and advance my horn playing career as far as I can.

In a year or so, once I’ve finished the rest of the OU course and gained a reasonable knowledge of server-side scripting, database apps, server management and everything else, I’ll be in a position to review this plan and see if I can realistically go into web design on a more serious level.

By then of course, the LSO, the Berlin Phil and Chicago Symphony will all be fighting over me, so it’ll all be academic. ahem ;-)

Right, here goes…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 29th, 2005 at 4:17 am and is filed under Horn Playing, Web Design, General Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.