Spicest Web Design Interview with Michael Ott of ThatWebGuyBlog

Michael Ott is a veteran web designer from Perth, Australia who decided to create a pretty interesting blog called “ThatWebGuyBlog.com”. He originally started the site because friends and colleagues had questions about design. He is a Senior Designer with a Perth-based firm and he has been designing sites for the past 11 years by his calculations.

Mike’s blog is full of useful information that is written to encourage exploration in web design and coding and to spread the word of best practices in web design. ThatWebGuyBlog.com is laid out in a simple and easy to digest manner which is perfect for people looking to learn a new technique and I am sure that you’ll enjoy reading his musings about web design in general.

What was your original idea when starting ThatWebGuyBlog.com?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’ve been running another blog for about 5 years now but it’s not really the right place for me to be posting articles about design (although I did occasionally sneak a few in).

Secondly I get enquiries from friends, colleagues and twitter followers about design – what tools or apps to use, how to accomplish a certain thing with CSS – and of course the obligatory “why doesn’t this work in IE!?” etc. A lot of these queries also come from designers new to the industry, and I often lend a hand to those who send me a tweet for help. I think, because I’ve been designing and coding for about 11 years now, that there is some (misguided?) notion to suggest I might know what I’m doing

So with this in mind it was time to start a new blog.

How long have you been running it for?

It’s very new – only launched in May 2009. I don’t advertise it anywhere and rely pretty much on word of mouth – or word of twitter mostly. I’ve been mentioned on a stack of CSS showcase web sites and that doesn’t hurt for publicity either.

I see that ThatWebGuyBlog.com is made up of people writing content.  How many contributors do you currently have?

There’s only me actually, but I’ve had a couple of requests from industry colleagues and friends if they can contribute. I’m entertaining the idea of opening it up to guest posts, but no concrete plans just yet.

How can web designers and the web design community benefit from your site?

That’s a tricky one to answer, because there are already several resources out there (ALA comes to mind) that kind of make ThatWebGuyBlog.com and a lot of other smaller blogs redundant. That said, I try to write my articles to be less intimidating and get to the point faster. At least the latter is what I’ve been told. My articles do however concentrate more on common web design best practices that seem to have been forgotten or never learned by beginners and industry professionals. I still know of seasoned designers for example, who know nothing about semantics, or don’t bother to get their sites to validate. This both amuses and annoys me.

What future plans do you have for the website?

I would be lying if I said I had a concrete goal in sight. It’s evolving as ideas come to me. As eluded earlier I am thinking about having guest posts from other designers who know more about me on a certain subject. PHP for example, is something I’m only average at best, so I’m hardly qualified to write an article that might require better than average PHP skills. I also plan to add more tutorials with a CSS/XHTML focus.

And like any good designer I plan to tweak the design whenever I get the urge. Your own blog is pretty much the only place a designer can go nuts without consequence.

What makes and keeps you so passionate about running this website Mike?

I’m far from being a design guru despite what it says on my coffee mug. I love being challenged and learning other ways of doing things – and more importantly learning why those alternative ways might be better. I think many designers (myself included) can sometimes get stuck into doing things a certain way. Having the blog forces me to think hard about what I’m writing  - because even though I might think I know everything on a certain topic, I have to ask myself “but is that method really the best way to do it?” – and I know anything I say is open to scrutiny and more importantly, discussion. There’s something to be said about committing your ideas to electronic paper and having them literally undergo a peer review process. It’s both liberating and scary.

Passion is one thing, time is another. I work full time as a Senior Designer and I can only give ThatWebGuyBlog.com attention between work and raising a family. A lot of my articles are fully or partially composed during the train ride to work and back (or when my daughters are asleep!).

Naturally web design is a topic that we find interesting but do you ever find that you run out of material to write about and where do you find the topics for the articles that you write?

Finding a topic to write about is always a challenge because let’s face it – most have been done already. But I keep an updated document of potential topics even though I usually end up scrapping some of those ideas.

Inspiration usually comes from an unexpected source – Twitter. I often help designers in the Twitterverse with CSS or other design related issues, or just offer encouragement when it looks like they’re going to give up and go back to tables. If I haven’t already written an article on the subject of their despair, I will. And then I’ll share it of course