Communitymx

One for web designers and programmers, of all levels, and probably best if you have access to Adobe design products. It's a learning/teaching community that covers a very wide range of web-related topics, at varying skill levels, and rates its team of experts sufficiently highly to even charge for its services. And that's daring, given that there are millions of 'experts' out there giving free advice already. You do get a 9-day free trial (why nine days?) and if you don't want to subscribe thereafter or at all, you do get to read some articles for free and there are some free goodies to download. But it's clear from the start that the $17-$25 a month they're asking is the only way to get true value from the site, because that gives you access to everything, including the experts themselves. Also included are complete "jumpstart" web sites for Dreamweaver if you don't want or need to learn too much design work for yourself, and again these are free to members whilst non-members pay. The couple I looked very quickly at were around $30, which is not at all expensive for a professional layout that's ready to run in a browser. If you still don't want to subscribe, note that many articles are tantalizingly just out of reach except for descriptions and excerpts. If you're hooked, you may have to find $5 to read the rest of a particularly interesting one. So, the downside. There's too much here, and I didn't see any clear way of finding anything specific without having to root for it. I came into the site from a Google query about DNS servers, and yes, there was a good article there, but is the subject indexed anywhere? Not that I could immediately find, leaving me no obvious way of finding it again. The layout is anachronistic and at least in my opinion, inappropriate for a site which prides itself on teaching great web design. Having said that, from what I did read there really is good material here, and I like the way each article is graded for appropriate reading levels. There's no way I'm even going to attempt a five-star article, because I know in advance even the title is going to be incomprehensible to me. A one-star, well, I could manage the title, anyway. So readers are saved time-wasting attempts to understand things which they don't realize are going to be beyond their understanding, and likely their needs, too. I'd like to give this a but am going to a Cool because there was just too much to wander around, and it took too long to wander around it, to judge the content fairly. And clearly, the best of the goodies are reserved for subscribers. It's interesting, though, that even in these days when everyone is a blogger and most bloggers are web tech and design people, and most web tech and design people are at least allegedly skilled in something or other and more than happy to share it for free, just for the small town fame, there's still room for an unashamedly professional teaching community which offers information and tutorials that people are willing to pay for. It almost has to be worth risking a one-month $25 membership, just to find out why, especially if you're sitting there with a couple of thousand bucks' worth of Adobe Creative Suite, no idea where to begin and a client demanding a site by next Thursday.