Interview With Richard Bering
Richard Bering is a part-owner of White Meadows Farms, a family-owned farm that specializes in Maple Syrup related products and relies heavily on the local tourism industry.
Richard describes himself as an operations manager. He does a bit of everything—from plowing fields, to training new employees, to managing the farm's email newsletter. He decided to learn CSS because he wanted to maintain his own website without hiring an outside web design company to do it for him.
How about starting by describing a typical work day?
(Laughs) I don't even know how to answer that question! It varies so much from one day to the next. The beginning of this week I spent three days installing solar panels on the roof of our shed to heat our workshop. It took forever because several of our employees kept interrupting me!
Yesterday we just brought a new administrative assistant on board, so I burned through the entire day showing her the ropes. We went through our shipping procedure, I set her up a computer and an email address, etc.
How much technical experience did you have before you started with CSS?
I took a few programming courses in high school, and I worked a fair bit with Excel for the farm. In college I had to build a web site using HTML and FrontPage.
Did you ever try to take a shot at CSS before Stylizer?
When it came to redesign the web site for our farm, I first tried to build it myself from scratch. I took a look at CSS, and sort of understood the concept, but found that the implementation was way over my head. I couldn't figure out how CSS was supposed to affect the HTML on the web page.
What is it about Stylizer that helped you finally wrap your head around CSS?
Seeing what the CSS properties do as you go though and edit each <div>. That, and having all the properties on the screen for you that you can play with. You can't just see what a property does in a text editor.
This interview was conducted on May 12th, 2009, after a Skybound employee met with him for a personal 3-hour training session on CSS and Stylizer. Although Richard is by no means a CSS ninja, he has enough skill to put together a standards-compliant, CSS-based web site.
You can visit White Meadows Farms at www.whitemeadowsfarms.com.
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