Writing books

- Before this book, there was a tiny vanguard of people designing with web standards, and everyone else was using Flash or tables. This book, for whatever reason, it just blew people's minds and I started having people coming up to me saying "I was going to leave web design, "but then I read your book and you changed my..." Not that I invented all these ideas, this was a whole community that came up with these ideas, but I managed through argumentation to help people get it. Some of the people on Amazon hated this book. And said "Everyone's talking about this book, "but I don't understand it because there's "not even any code until you get to chapter five." That was deliberate. This is a book of argument. I had to persuade people who didn't know about web standards or didn't care about them, why it really mattered to the people who used their website, why it really mattered to their marketing department and their content people and everyone else that cared about the future of their website, why it mattered to the future of their website and their product because the web is where everything is going. And then, I also had to help the people who were already on board, give them the ammunition they needed to go to work and say, "Here's why we're going to do this, boss. "We have to do this differently now, boss." Because that's what people, a lot of times designers speak to designers and developers speak to developers and we forget to provide that translation to the business user, to the decision maker, this had to be persuasive to the decision maker. Letting your people do this will help them get search results, so your content is found. There's been three editions. You know, the third edition obviously gets into responsive design and other kinds of newer things. And if we wrote a fourth one, my God, it would probably have to be seven times this thick, because there's so much now. In fact, there's so much now, that instead of trying to put it all in one book, I got together with some other friends and made a publishing company where we can make little books that tackle each of the many things that need to be tackled, in great depth, without reference to the other stuff. Instead of trying to make the ultimate book that tells you everything about designing with web standards, let's make a book just on HTML5, let's make a book just on Mobile First, right? And finding these great authors, helping them focus it even more, and making these books, to me, is the way to continue this education process for the whole industry, all of us learning together.