Happy Little Trees & Websites
What do painting with Bob Ross and developing websites have in common?
Hello, I’m Daniel “Bob Ross” Knoben, and I would like to welcome you to this blog post about the joy of painting — and developing websites. During the pandemic, like many of you, I took up a new hobby. Unlike many of you who started gardening, or others who discovered the wonders of sourdough, I took up oil painting to while away the hours stuck at home. So today, I thought we would do a nice little blog post talking about some of the things painting like Bob Ross and developing websites have in common.
Let’s get started.
A Good Foundation is Key
Before you begin painting or developing a website, you will need to have an end goal in mind. If we are painting a landscape with a lake, we need to put down a thin coat of liquid white, but if we want to paint a dark stream in the early morning, it is better to use black gesso and liquid clear on the bottom half of the painting.
It’s of course the same with developing a website. Depending on the needs of the client, picking the right foundation is key, whether that be WordPress, Drupal, Symfony, or a custom solution. Developing with the right platform, like using the right base coat in painting, will do a lot of the work for you.
Know Which Elements Need to be Included
When painting, it’s important to know what elements we will include, whether it be fluffy clouds, a big ol’ mountain, a beautiful waterfall, or some happy little trees and bushes. If we start painting before knowing what features we want to include, we might end up with happy trees behind a mountain covering all our fluffy clouds.
It is the same story when developing a website. Before we start, we need to know the different elements we are developing and how they will relate to each other, or we might end up with a website that is missing features or where things feel like they have been tacked on.
Practice, Practice, Practice
My first painting was full of happy little accidents, as Bob might put it. But with each subsequent painting I did, I got better and better. The same of course goes for development. The more sites I work on, the more I learn. And the more I learn, the better I get at developing.
Use the Techniques and Skills to Try New Things
Bob Ross’s tutorials are great, and he paints some beautiful pictures, but the shows are about more than a step-by-step on how to copy his paintings. The shows want to give you the skills you need to go out and make your own paintings using the techniques he has taught. When it comes to developing websites, we are always trying new things. As long as we have a strong understanding of common development practices, we will experiment with new platforms, new plugins and modules, and new languages, all in an effort to make something beautiful for our clients.
