John Rainsford

I hold an honours degree in Printing Management and even though I am now a web designer (a long story for another day), most of what I learned during my four years in college still stands to me in my day-to-day running of my web design company.

In the third year of my course I had a lecture each week called Operations Management. The lecturer was really great, he had some great insights into how a production-based business should run, not just from a theoretical standpoint, but also from a pragmatic point of view.

One such insight was when he told us that when referring to any process, the old saying “practise makes perfect” should really be “practise makes permanent”. A guy (or gal) who picks up bad habits during a period of time or is initially taught incorrectly, will then proceed to do their task or job incorrectly, unless corrected.

The lesson was that you must constantly check your processes, whether it’s a human or mechanical process- time has a habit of changing things, one way or the other.

The web is such a fast changing medium that you can easily pick up techniques and habits on a day-to-day basis. Even though publications relating to the web, like books, can go out of date quickly, their benefit is in reassessing what you know and the way in which you’ve been carrying out your job. This allows you to correct yourself and continue on progressively enhancing.