Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

I had two con­ver­sa­tions with tal­ented ad cre­atives yes­ter­day that reminded me of how far main­tain­ing this blog and my other sites have taken me in the last year. The first was about SEO and the sec­ond was about pro­fi­ciency with devel­op­ment. Nei­ther one of them had been expected to have any tech­ni­cal exper­tise until they were laid off last year and started job hunt­ing. Improv­ing my skill set is some­thing I’ve been pas­sion­ate about on in the last cou­ple years — obvi­ously I have good reason.

Work­ing with the Web began for me pro­fes­sion­ally in 1996 while writ­ing the first web­site and ban­ners ads for a car com­pany. I’ve con­tin­ued to work on dig­i­tal assign­ments since. Writ­ing pos­si­bly hun­dreds of sites, thou­sands of ban­ner ads, and var­i­ous web com­po­nents to adver­tis­ing cam­paigns since. I even had a blog­ger blog and a WordPress.com blog for awhile. But I never had a rea­son to get too involved in the tech­ni­cal side of things till I began this self-hosted blog.

It was hav­ing this blog that caused me to start think­ing about all of the things that I took for granted when some­one else was doing them. SEO, CSS, ana­lyt­ics and just get­ting things to func­tion the way you want them too. It’s also allowed to be exper­i­ment with tools, like those neat but­tons at the top and bot­tom of this post.

Where am I going with this? Read­ing blogs is a great way to gain use­ful infor­ma­tion, be exposed to dif­fer­ent things, and have a good laugh. But actively main­tain­ing a blog will build a deeper under­stand­ing of how things actu­ally work. And may also help you develop some mar­ketable skills before you really, really need them.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

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This entry was posted Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 4:33 pm and is filed under social media. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.