What happened, in a nutshell, is that the University decided to transfer the technical part of my job (including all coding), from Communications to IT. There is often a battle over who “owns” the web in higher ed. The same goes on at Waterloo.

The problem for me was that the job I had was probably about 70% technical. And that’s being conservative. I was responsible for the front-end code and back-end applications that supported the University’s communications efforts.As I’ve said here before, I love walking the line between design and development. It’s why I was attracted to this career path in the first place. The job I had before was probably too technical for me. That doesn’t mean that I was okay with losing the code altogether. A position where I was unable to work on any production code wasn’t something I was interested in. So I decided to move on.

Maternity leave in Ontario

Although I didn’t find out about it until much later, this change was made while I was on maternity leave. You may assume, as I did, that the organization has to keep your job for you while you’re on leave. This isn’t technically true. They are allowed to restructure in the normal course of business (sounds reasonable). If this is the case, they have to offer you a comparable position.

What “comparable” means is up for interpretation. It’s clear that the pay has to be the same, but what about the work? There’s nothing to say that it has to be comparable in nature, or in quality, quantity, or difficulty.

A lot can change when you’re gone for a year. The employer has probably forgotten about you, in the same way that you’ve probably forgotten about them. When you’re on leave, you’re not there to influence any changes they might be considering. Heck, you probably won’t even know it’s happening.

I’ve heard other stories of negative job changes that have happened to women on maternity leave. I know someone who was asked to re-apply for her own job when she returned (the employer wanted to keep her replacement). In another situation I can recall, the replacement was kept on and became the woman’s supervisor. I have a friend who is currently on leave from a job where she works on commission. Her employer is now raising prices to the point where she’s concerned that her clients won’t come back.

There’s often an underlying suspicion that the woman might decide not to come back. Lots of people do that. You might hear comments around the office along these lines. “Is she coming back”? or “Oh, you’re covering a mat leave? Well, maybe she won’t come back.” Your replacement might be hoping that you don’t come back so she can keep the job. Like the case of my acquaintance mentioned above, the company might want to keep the replacement.

I would love to hear from other women who have experienced similar problems after returning from maternity leave. It’s a difficult thing to deal with, especially when it didn’t occur to you that this could happen. It’s that same old problem of balancing work and family. It’s wonderful to be able to take a year to spend with your newborn. Is it worth risking your career for? I think most mothers would say it is, with varying degrees of certainty. That still doesn’t make it an easy choice.

Moving on

It was a rough six months, but now that I’m finished at UW I can actually think about what I really want to do. I love to work at the intersection of design and development. I enjoy the complete process of designing and building a website, with all the quirky users and browsers and search engines to deal with.

Right now I’m doing some freelancing. I might continue down this path indefinitely. It has been our long-term plan to work on our own, and hopefully to become geographically independent. I also might consider full-time positions as they come up. I have the luxury of looking for the right job, rather than the one that happens to be there at the right time

Comments on this post are moderated. If you have a story about losing your job after returning from maternity leave, please comment!

So how can I contribute? How can I combine my interests into a meaningful, fulfilling, successful career? Do I have to pick a speciality? Am I asking too much of myself? In web design we are frequently faced with the work of experts in our field. Is it unfair to compare ourselves to them? Surely, yet sometimes it’s hard not to.What I’m faced with now is the prospect of specialization. Specialization in a direction that’s quite outside my skills and interests. I like to think of the skills involved in web design and development as a continuum between the creative and the technical:

The line marks where I am on the curve. Usability and mark-up is the heart of what I do. I love the challenge of figuring out how to make something work well for people, and then actually implementing it with code.

In my previous position at work, my job was further to the right than I’d like to be. I had to deal with rails apps and server problems and other things that were quite outside my skills and interests. Now I’m being pushed in the other direction. Do I want to be a designer, without the ability to write code?

One of the things that attracted me to web design in the first place was the ability to make things happen. I did my undergrad degree in planning. A very slow moving discipline. You could spend years working on a project only to find out that the government won’t put up the money for it. Things happen at a snails pace, and that was frustrating for me.

Then I discovered web design, in the form of Netscape Contribute (version 3, circa 1997). This was IT! Creative and technical at the same time. You could code something, put it on a server, and people would see it immediately. Almost fourteen years later and I’m still trying to find the right fit.

This takes up time. Time I could be spending with more valuable contributions to the forum. I could write more valuable posts. I could add more functionality that would be helpful to users.  I could write more blog posts. I could write more articles for A Padded Cell. I could clean my house.

The topic of SEO

Most of these spammy posts come in the SEO and Marketing forums. I suspect that many of these people work for those companies that send you unsolicited email telling you that they can get your site to the “top of Google”. Unfortunately, many unsuspecting website owners fall for that.

These people think that forum signatures are a good way to get backlinks, and they have a tiny bit of knowledge of SEO (seeing as how they work for an “SEO company”), so they post a bunch of crappy posts in our forum. Thus, our forum becomes filled with crappy SEO posts.

We don’t want to be an SEO forum!

We don’t! And yet, because we rank well for “Webmaster Forums”, this is what we have become. If given the choice, we wouldn’t call that. This is a legacy thing for us. This forum was started back in the 90′s. It was one of the first forums of it’s kind. In those days, SEO was only one of the many things as “webmaster” might do. In those days, web people weren’t nearly as specialized as we are now.

What I’d really like to do is ditch the Webmaster Forums domain and  merge everything into A Padded Cell. Then we might have a better chance of attracting the kind of members we want. The problem is that we’re currently first in Google UK for “webmaster forums” and second in Google Canada. How can you abandon a #1 ranking in Google?

Where do these people come from?

We have noticed that the majority of these spammy posts come from South- and South-East Asia. Normally I’m a big fan of diversity. It’s always been one of the strengths of our community. But this is starting to become a bit of an issue. Lately they’re even becoming more open about where they’re from. They used to say they were from the US or Britain, but now they’ll be honest (which I don’t mind, because lying about where they’re from really annoyed me).

Why is it an issue? Well, mainly because I think it can be off-putting to other members. They may think that everyone in our forum is from these regions and therefore they don’t fit in. These members don’t write English very well and their posts often don’t make sense. They also tend to use wording that would seem strange to native English speakers (e.g. calling other members “dear”). Add this to the fact that the actual content of these posts is not very strong.

All of this would be fine in smaller amounts, but when the majority of our posts have one or more of these issues it tends to lower the quality of the forum overall. If the quality of the post content was better none of this would be a problem.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all members from South-east Asia are problems. They’re not.  We have some very good members from that part of the world. It just so happens that most of the spam comes from there too.

Do people even want to talk about design & development?

It seems that few people want to talk about anything other than SEO. I was wondering what it is about these topics that make them more popular than others. There are a few factors that could contribute to that:

• In design & development, forums aren’t that important. I imagine there are a lot of designers and developers who have never participated in a forum community. In SEO and Marketing, the opposite is true. Forums are an important part of the professional community, and there are a lot of them. In comparison, there are relatively few forums that focus more on design and/or development. Why is that? Do people just not want to talk about web design? I actually think that the SEO community overall is much stronger than the design and development communities (but that might be a topic for another post!).
• SEO is easy to talk about. It’s easy for people to have an opinion about simple questions like how to improve your site ranking (not that these opinions are necessarily good ones!). It’s also easy to articulate what these techniques are. How do you explain a process of problem solving in design or programming? How do you explain a design approach that is innate?
• Design & development questions often don’t prompt ongoing discussion. A question on SEO, such as “how do I get more traffic” can get a lot of responses over time. In contrast, design and development qustions are often very specific. This doesn’t line up in IE6. How do I fix this code? They don’t need answers from multiple people, let alone an ongoing discussion. Once the problem is solved the topic is over.

We are also targetting a more beginner level audience. These people don’t live and breathe web design like the professionals do. It might be a hobby, or a tiny part of their job. They might just be starting out in the profession. Engaging these users is tough. Currently I am reading the Art of Community by Jono Bacon and it’s giving me a lot of ideas.

The sentimental value

I met my husband on this forum. I have spent a tremendous amount of time over the years posting, deleting spam, and otherwise improving the place. This alone is the main reason why I keep doing this.

Sure, getting comments isn’t a true sign of readership, but I think it’s at least an indication that people are finding my posts to be interesting. But I don’t know if it’s really about that for me. If nobody was reading, would I still write?

To be honest, that’s not the main reason why I started this blog. Sure, its nice to share knowledge and insight with others. But it’s also good to get things off my chest. Sometimes I tend to over think things and can’t get them out of my mind. Writing them down, even if nobody is reading it, gets it out of my head. And then I don’t have to think about it anymore.

But don’t get me wrong, I do really appreciate and value any participation I get here. It’s amazing to think that there are people out there who are interested in what I have to say. And I do really want to engage with you, if you’re reading. Thank you for being here

I could take a different approach with this blog, and write more linkbaity type stuff, although I tend to save that sort of content for A Padded Cell. I don’t really want this to be a place where I’m just trying to get more traffic or more readers or more comments. I want it to be authentic. I know I need to try to draw out the readers more than I do. I also should be linking out and participating in discussions more than I do now. Maybe those can be my goals for 2008.

So that’s why I blog. For any bloggers who happen to be reading, why do you blog?

I’ll also do some consulting on other web projects for the University, work on some web apps they have developed, and do some outreach to other web designers and site maintainers. I might have a blog there as well (the last guy did), but I haven’t talked to my new boss yet about it so I’m not sure. That would mean that I’ll be spread a little thin, with writing here, at A Padded Cell, and the new blog. However, the new blog would have more of a focus on super beginner-level stuff while I would continue to focus on more advanced topics here. The new job will definitely open me up to a lot of new ideas which I could write about here.

Another great thing about the new job is that they use Macs — bye bye Windoze!! Well, obviously I’ll have to test on there once in awhile, but I won’t have to use it regularly!

This is the "other things on the go" that I was referring to in my previous post — I spent much of the end of August and the first part of September preparing my resume and portfolio to apply for the job. I designed my resume using Scribus, which I might post about later (it has an option to align text to a baseline grid — I’m not sure if other page layout programs do this but it was a godsend!)