A career in webdesign?

[The Laughing Cow]

Hi, im 17 and studying alevels at the mo and im interested in a career in IT. ill be a Cisco Certified Network (cant think of "A" word) 2.

Web design seems to be where i wanna go cos programming seems full of geeks and i just wanna do somthing where the guys r up for a laff and some drink ;) besides Web design is my interest!

For those of you in the trade- what sort of things should i be learning? what software?

i know moderate HTML but tend to use FP2000 and a little Dreamweaver. Im learning Flash at the moment too. I know VBscript too so hopefully some ASP, Javascript should come fairly easily(?)

what are the musts for me to know then?

thanks for your help!

[mr_grumpy_man]

You have two (and a half) basic directions you can go in when you begin. You can either be a 'technical' or a 'creative'.

'Technical's code and put together flash/html/script/java/back-ends/databases etc. This seems to be the direction you're going in. To go down this route you should really know html inside out, upside down and back to front. On top of this some kind of specialisation in a language such as ASP/PHP is pretty much essential, in addition to good groundings in languages such as java/script.

Alternativly you could become a 'creative'. These are the "idea" people who decide the look/branding/structure of the site. Such people are from a design/art base rather than a techy background.

Alternatively you could consider doing a bit of both. It's been argued that true creatives have no concept of the technology in use and it's restrictions. Similarly, it's been said Techies are dull and unimaginative. So some companies have 'Createcs' who do both the technical and design parts of the job (pretty much what amatuers like you and me do anyway :) ).

There are other directions (data architect, creative driector etc) but I'll leave them as they're a bit too specialised.

By the sounds of it you hope to be a 'techy'. Looks like I've pretty much covered the basics above. In addition to that it doesn't hurt to be very good with a package such as Dreamweaver and art/graphic packages by companies such as Adobe. Also beneficial would be experience in a package such as Macromedia Ultradev or Generator.

Um, I think that just about covers it. Your best bet is to get some webby magazines and look through the job adverts and see what they're looking for.

Hope this helps mate.

[The Laughing Cow]

thanks a lot mate thats VERY helpful for me to get an idea on what i need to do. :) at this point in time im interested in both the techy sides and creative sides but i imagine when you are in a job you're gonna be working in a team and doing one or other(?) For the gfx side of design what software should i be looking into?

as u mentioned i should know HTML inside out- i think i'll try making this current webpage im mastering completly in Notepad :confused:

thanks again

Cow

[sjs]

Careful when you do that Techy stuff though, might turn into a geek. :)

[J@ck]

Grumpy has probably covered it all.

One thing I will add, though. Make sure your code (be it HTML, script, etc.) follows the W3C (http://www.w3c.org) standards. If you wanna do web sites professionally, discounting around 20% of users just because they use a browser other than IE4+ will not cut the mustard for any organisation.

Also, produce tidy code, and close off every tag that can be.

For example:

<p>This paragraph should have a closing tag at the end</p>

<ul>
<li>List items should be closed</li>
<li><b>fomatting should be inside the tags</b></li>
</ul>

The same goes for tables & table cells.

Make sure headings ARE headings. Although these two lines produce the same effect.....

<p><b>Chapter 1</b></p>

<h4>Chapter 1</h4>

There is software out there that will decypher it diffrently. Maximum usablity / readabilty means clear & concise code.

I know it seems pedantic and cosmetic, but it seperates a professional coder from someone that puts WELCOME TO MY HOMEPAGE in blink text on their web site.

Hope this helps & good luck, mate.

jack.

[mr_grumpy_man]

Graphics packages vary by company - there's invariably an institutional preference towards once package.

A good start would be Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks (only because it's so easy to tie into DW). And it won't harm at all if you're good with Paint Shop Pro as a lot of the features and methods in there are fairly standard across most packages.

And J@ck's advice is spot on - I've heard of companies that get you to write some HTML for them at the interview. While they're not necessarily looking for it to follow the W3C standards, they do make it infinatly more readable and it sounds impressive if you can say "look at this, it conforms to the W3C HTML4 specifications" :)

[The Laughing Cow]

yeah you guys are very helpful! my computing teacher is always stressing how he wants VB to be in the correct format ie indenting "if" and stuff.

thanks guys im gonna get to work on ensuring i know HTML perfectly and some GFX editing too. is there anything else im missing?

[J@ck]

Yes.

Never eat yellow snow.

[Tonster]

Well I'm from the 'creative' side of the fence so I thought I'd add my two pennies worth.

I'd highly recommend learning Photoshop if you want to get into the creative side. Something like 90% of all pro designers use it and if you're going for a design based job then it is possibly the most essential programme to know. I've been using it for about 8 years now and know it inside out.

Additionally, any/all of the major Macromedia programmes are practically industry standards now (Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver) and a sound knowledge of those will stand you in good stead.

Designing the graphics for sites is a world apart from writing the code. I'm a graphic designer by trade and frankly the coding side of things scares me, but I'm learning it.

The jack of all trades is the master of none, and I'd recommend you specialise in one side of things, but keep a good eye on the other.

[7ths0n]

I'm on the creative side of the fence, but unfortunately I don't get much creative input in what i do. I don't design websites for companys... I work for a web based company. So I'm pretty much a 'maintenance' kinda guy.. do a partnership page here, fix a broken graphic there kinda thing. Oh, one note, beware the marketing gimps :) I don't know if this is true for all companys but where i am the marketing dept. are somewhat lacking in taste.... choosing the most plain dullest looking banner you've done over the really funky looking one. The way i see things should work... marketing give us the content, we design the page with the content in mind, we give to the techy people to work their magic/code. Unfortunately for us here it doesn't seem to work that way, anyone have similar experiences ?

So um... yeah... don't think I've actually answered your questions, just having a gripe :) But these guys have pretty much answered better than i could ever hope to. All i can say is if it's what you wanna do then stick with it :) it's worth it :)

^7th^

[The Laughing Cow]

cheers guys!

[The Laughing Cow]

oh my final question is there any specific way HTML should be laid out physically on the page? cos i tend to do mine all like:



<HTML>

<HEAD><TITLE>CES Alarms</TITLE>


<FRAMESET cols="20%,1*" frameborder="0">
<FRAME marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" noresize name="navmenu" src="menu.htm">
<FRAME name="rightframe" src="rightframe.htm">
</FRAMESET><noframes></noframes>

<BODY>

</BODY>

</HTML>



is this the right format how pages should be laid out?

[alpha]

If you're talking about thinks like upper/lower case HTML, indentation etc. then it doesn't make any difference whatsoever. However, in your example above you're missing a </head> and the <body> section serves no purpose :). You should also never leave the <noframes> section empty.

[The Laughing Cow]

yeah i just noticed those errors when i was adding some java script. but when should i indent e.t.c.?

[7ths0n]

I tend to indent on every nested tag... so for example...

<table yadda yadda..>
...<tr>
......<td>Wibble</td>
...</tr>
...<tr>
......<td>Flibble</td>
...</tr>
</table>

(Ignore the periods at the beginning, this gh3y forum seems to ignore the spaces i put in :P)

You'll find most WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get, in case you where wondering) editors tend to do the same... don't forget comments too, they're the single most useful part of any piece of code... as anyone will tell you.

Also...

If you're talking about thinks like upper/lower case HTML, indentation etc.

You're right in saying upper/lowercase text doesn't matter, however i know many people who use upper case to denote HTML tags and lower case for most text (makes sense seeing as we right most of the stuff in lowercase anyway :E). It just makes life easier when you're trying to distinguish whats what when you're looking at the raw HTML. As for indentation... well, anyone who doesn't indent is asking for trouble later on :) I'll just say it makes things much more easier on the eye if you do.

^7th^

[Waldo]

I read somewhere (don't know if it is true) that any line breaks or spaces/indents on the HTML code made the file larger... hang on, that must be true... the question is, how much bigger is the file going to be?

[7ths0n]

Regards the line breaks / indents / spaces / etc.

http://www.7thson.cwc.net/example01.txt

and...

http://www.7thson.cwc.net/example02.txt

The difference is pathetically miniscule.

the first file has 2 indents and i think 4 line breaks in the text file itself. the second file has none... first file is 40 bytes and the second file is 32 bytes... at most i would say the largest pages probably create an extra 1Kb of size with all the spaces / indents / etc... that 1Kb is negligible and we're talking about large pages here. But then again, this is just a rough educated guess regards the final additional size.... but in my experience, that extra 1Kb+ of size makes all the difference when you're looking at the code.

Cheers,

^7th^

[CrazyCrane]

You can actually save a fair bit by removing extraneous white space from files - bear in mind that larger files have more levels of indentation, and therefore a higher percentage of white space to useful stuff. For large pages you can save 40-50 percent (I mean your tiny example there saves 20%) - so on a page that might be say 15K you can save 7-8K, which does make a difference.

However, readable code is vital, and using indentations is one of the best ways of making your code readable - along with comments and good naming conventions (for JavaScript, ASP etc. etc.) It's an absolute bitch to alter a large file if it's been "compressed" by removing white space - having it indented etc. makes it simple to see where you've missed a closing tag or overlapped tags or whatever.

One solution is to write your code nicely indented and commented, then when you're happy run it through a little program which removes all of the white space you don't need - so you work on and edit a nice looking file, but you publish small compact files. This has the drawback that you're working on one file and putting a different one live (not really ideal), but as long as you have a good configuration management system going it shouldn't cause any real problems...

[revlis]

A company I've worked for http://www.i-love-you.com had to cut down on their download time before they launched. So they did many things like cut down on images and their size etc. But if you check the html code you'll notice that everything is all compacted together. This helped alot but only was done as a last resort. BTW they only launched a few weeks ago.

That's my two shillings