On the the New York City Dance and Technology Meetup

I was reading the feeds on my iGoogle page, and I came across this post on Danciti. The author seems to have taken offense at the new “DanceTech” Meetup group by Doug Fox of Great Dance.

In this particular post, the Danciti author comments on of the suggested meetup topics, ‘How dancers can create professional websites without any technical training or background, and do this very inexpensively’: “It’s just the hight of conceit to believe that you can create professional results in my field [web design] without training.” After I read that, I was offended. However, the owner of Danciti does not have a comment section, so I’ll write it here.


To the Danciti author:

I do not think that the topic “How dancers can create professional websites without any technical training or background, and do this very inexpensively” is implying that an individual with no technical or web design training can create “professional” quality web designs that are on par with what an actual web developer could provide.

In my opinion, that is such an extremely obvious point, I do not see how anyone could be offended. I think Doug’s mission with this workshop is to help dance companies generate more income using internet marketing techniques, by lowering the barrier of entry to the web. Perhaps if professional web development firm offered to design slick websites, pro bono, for dance companies with limited budgets and outdated technology he wouldn’t feel the need to do this workshop. You and I know that building good websites is not that easy and takes plenty of resources which, as far as I know, is  probably why that is not the current situation.

In fact, I think that the Danciti author should go ahead and create a workshop for fat web developers who want to put on a full-length ballet. Dance is for everyone. Why deny them the opportunity to perform? If there was such a workshop, I would seriously doubt the professionalism of any dancer that was actually offended by such a workshop. Why? Because it’s OBVIOUS that web developers would not be as good as ballet as someone who spent 8 hours dancing everyday, nor would the performance be as good as what you would get if you paid $100+ for a ticket to a see a professional dance company perform.

Sorry, Doug. Apparently, it is true that no good deed goes unpunished.