This has been in the back of my mind for a while, but I never really had a fully formed thought about it.

Whenever I see or hear about a kid going to a “nerd/geek/computer camp”, the camp seems to be teaching them “website building”. By website building, I mean throwing Dreamweaver (and Flash) infront of them, and seemingly saying “go nuts!”.

This creates a few inherent problems, which I’ll go over here.

First, using Dreamweaver doesn’t really teach someone how to create a manageable website - it just teaches you how to create a static page, which isn’t useful in web development today at all. Most websites are powered by CMSs such as Wordpress, Typepad, Drupal, Joomla, etc. When they take a look at how to develop templates for these platforms, they really will have no idea where to start.

Second, Dreamweaver seems to use tons of javascript, which is a really stupid thing to do. What about the people who run Javascript blockers such as NoScript? Oh, right. Lots of content on the page won’t work. This is a big nono. You want to add fail safes into the page for people who don’t run Javascript. The idea behind web development is to support all your users, not just a few.

As well, these camps seems to teach that you should be using Flash buttons. Not good. Once again, if you run NoScript, then you don’t see the Flash buttons, and can’t navigate the page. I honestly don’t see a need for flash buttons. A simple image, or even text will do most (if not all) of the time.

As you can see, this renders the site completly unusable. Also, how will search engines index the site? Hmm indeed.

Finally, not teaching how to actually create the website (via HTML), they leave the kids thinking that to work on the website, it requires Dreamweaver. Now, Dreamweaver costs $400. Do you think that these kids are going to pay for that? Hah. 90% of them are going to pirate it, not realizing that they can actually open up the HTML page in any text editor and work on the page that way. Of course, there are many good, free multi-language editors out there:

But you say “I know tons of professional developers that use Dreamweaver!”. Well, sure there do. But they have also learned how to write HTML markup, CSS, Javascript, etc. They use it regularily while developing. They use Dreamweaver as a tool to assist in creating a website, not a tool to make the website for them.

As you can see, there are plenty of other (better) ways to teach kids about web design, but in my opinion, some of these camps, courses, and schools are taking the easy road. Sure, it might take a bit longer to teach the “right” way to do something, but it’ll pay off in the long run.