There’s suddenly plenty of spring garden blogging to catch up on, but for the next few weeks I’ll be giving first priority to my web design class. Yep, that’s right, I finally bit the bullet and signed up for a real class in Dreamweaver CS3. I’m halfway through the course and loving it.

My brain is delightully strained as I learn the basics of nifty things like CSS and AP Divs and soon, Spry Widgets (whatever they are). My aim by the end of the course is to totally revamp the local gardening website I made. After that, I hope to be able to offer to build nice-looking and user-friendly websites for nurseries, public gardens, florists… you name it.

This could be a fun way for me to combine my interests and earn generate some income by providing a helpful, reasonably priced service to organizations needing website construction and/or maintenance.

When I earned my horticulture degree at the ripe old age of Oh, Who Cares, I decided to forgo a career in the industry in order to continue being a stay-at-home mom to my then-young son. Not surprisingly, I started going a little stir-crazy when faced with little more to stimulate my plant-filled mind than household chores, grocery shopping, cooking, taking Master Elliot to soccer practice, swim lessons, Zany Brainy book club meetings, neighborhood parks, libraries, toy stores, play dates, doing drop-off and pick-up for Parks & Rec., kids’ cooking classes, tennis lessons, and school. Even backyard gardening failed to quench my thirst for more.

I think that’s because the web is an exciting place. In school, I learned about so many great online resources for gardeners that I want to share with fellow gardeners. I was new to computers, but my professors made sure we learned how to use search engines, and how to communicate by e-mail and send attachments. Some gardeners have no interest in online gardening and prefer the tactile appeal of traditional books, magazines and newspapers. That’s fine. You’re not who I’m trying to reach. You’re not reading this.

Alternately, some tech-savvy gardeners have little interest in… let’s call it… paper gardening. Paper gardening seems stale… and expensive. To people like that… to me… the morning newspaper seems so “yesterday’s news”. You know? A gardening book, well, that thing was written a year or more before it reached the shelf.