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Any Web designers/developers out there?


SteveRS

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I would like a change in career and web design/developing has always been something i've wanted to do ever since leaving school 10 years ago now :scare: Unfortunately it never worked out that way, i was led down the wrong career path. Anyway i was wondering if someone could point me in the direction of any good up to date courses, preferably home study as i still need an income whilst studying. I bought a CIW home study course a few years back now and i've never been able to get stuck in, its 12 text books long and you dont do any design or developing until about 5-6 text books in, the rest is just Internet and how it works and various types of coding etc etc.

 

Any help would be gratefully recieved. :)

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I have been learning using this guy, yes his voice is annoying and yes he can be a bit long winded but it means he is thorough, which for an at home course is vital!

The fact it is a youtube series makes life so much easier as you can work while he talks. I watched a video through once, then went through it the second time with him and did this with each one.

 

I started knowing nothing and now I'm doing a couple of sites that are taking shape nicely. obviously you need dreamweaver for it but that is accessible. You get through about 8 videos before it helps to have the materials he supplies, they cost under 20 quid and are so worth the money as they include templates you can use for other sites you build in the future.

 

Hope that helps :thumbs:

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Find jobs that you think you want and see what qualifications they want. Web design/development like most developement jobs are massively over subscribed unless you have a very niche skill. You need to be trained up with the right qulaifications, its useless doing something they dont recognise.

 

Do you want to do it for a big firm (in house developement for a bluechip) or work for an agency? I know a few people in web design but they all went to Uni and studied it as a course so not a lot of help there.

 

And if you do use DreamWeaver, please tidy up the crappy code it writes ;)

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I've heard some of the qualifications you can get aren't recognised like you say, which makes it confusing when looking for a course. Ideally i would like to be freelance but would probably need to work for a company first to gain experience and pick up extra qualifications. i have never worked in an office so im not sure if i could handle it or not, but i'll give it a shot.

 

i've found this course:

 

http://www.nationalitlearningcentre.com ... pment.aspx

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Thats great husky, that could come in handy. Do you get to do any coding yourself or is it all templates?

part and part, he makes sure you understand each element of the template though. you could write it yourself from his tutorials though, the templates are just there to save you some typing :)

 

The whole thing is essentially coded by you though, HTML and CSS with some javascript in there too.

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If you want to work freelance then you'll need a portfolio behind you to gain work. One way to do this is to do the work for free for smaller organisations and clubs on the basis that you do it cheap/free and get to use it as an example to new clients, and you can do this on the side of a full time job to pay the bills. The other is to get an office job with a company that already does web design either for their own company or clients. If you want to do the latter then its best to approach companies and ask what qualifications and experience they are after - they should be very honest as they have nothing to hide really.

 

Also hit up web design forums/sites and see what they say. LinkedIn and JobServe would make good hunting grounds too.

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I work for a massive IT company in your neck of the woods. We don't do much web development in the usual sense, but whenever we look for someone in the coding\development line of work, and once the candidate gets past the HR filters, qualifications mean very little to the actual manager looking at the CV. Nearly all down to relevant experience, examples of work, and the right skills mix with the ability to work stuff out.

 

Web development means different things to different people sometimes it is things like ASP, VB.Net and PHP rather than whirly gigs and html. Consider looking at HTML5 which is one of those things that will take off (or has taken off) as tablet computers and phones really take hold, also worth considering taking a look at IOS\Android\WebOS as well.

 

Experts Exchange has a pretty active community once you get to the asking questions stage.

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I think your first port of call would be to decide whether you want to focus on design or development and specialise in one of the professions. I started my career as a web developer back in 2004 when you kind of had to do both but there are loads of people that can do both very averagely and in my opinion are now stuck working on smaller projects. My advice would be to decide how your existing skills will compliment your new ones and go town on them e.g. Very creative or analytical. I spent four years writing code and then realised that I much prefer the creative and user side of the Internet and have spent the last 3 years moving my direction to digital marketing which I absolutely love. I suggest you take a look at augmented reality if you're learning new skills- gonna be huge!

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I'm a web designer/developer :) Just about to hand in my notice tomorrow as I've been offered a job elsewhere! Worked on some really good projects with big name clients the past couple of years.

 

I went to uni and did a degree in multimedia which had no effect on getting a job. I came out of uni and freelanced for 6 months, built up a bit of a portfolio which got me my first job and I'm just about to move onto my second! If you need any info just post in here or fire me a PM, just off to the computer for the night now.

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To me it doesn't sound like necessarily you want to be doing web development, more, like a tech design role that was at webfactory/play when I was there.

 

Web development to me means asp.net web services (asmx), asp .net web pages (aspx), java server pages (jsp), javascript and css. With an emphasis on the first two (javascript and css are probably more along the lines of what you're thinking). Would like to learn some php at some stage but I doubt I will.

 

As mentioned though, HTML 5 is supposedly the one to look out for at the moment. Question is, which appeals: Design/Appearance, or Coding?

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I've been working as a Web Developer for the last 5 years ... but as others have mentioned above, yo need to decide whether it's designing or development you want to get into ...

 

You'll need to know HTML and css for both, but developing requires a knowledge of some server side scripting code, such as Asp.net, Php, C# etc ...

 

I'm not that creative so I don't really do any design work ... My job is to get the pages to work once the designer has made them look nice .. LoL

 

HTML 5 is definitely something to look at though ... I think a lot more companies will want to move their existing sites to HTML 5 for mobile solutions..

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I'm honestly not sure what those qualifications are going to mean in the grand scheme of things tbh.

 

The first one sounds a bit thin and I have no idea what the other course offers.

 

If you have time and want to learn for yourself, w3schools online. If you want accreditation, I only really know of developers courses myself unfortunately, but we use firebrandtraining iirc.

 

Also, if you wanted to learn at home, I believe there are MCTS courses that can be done at home (you buy the books and take the exam) ? MCTS courses would mean more than the courses mentioned.

 

I think, maybe if you look through the tutorials on w3schools and decide it's still for you, something like an MCTS ASP .net course would be a good start.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The comments here are pretty spot on, courses and books are good but qualifications arent as useful

you want to aim to end up with a skills matrix on your cv, a list of the technologies and languages that you know and some examples of websites that youve built, best way to do that is to just pimp yourself out for the first couple, if you hear somebody down the pub talking about looking for a website then offer to do it, theres no substitute for real world examples and it will give you a better idea of how to build sites if you have a purpose, rather than from a book

or if you have a hobby such as your Z or a project, then go through and try and build something relating to that, think of problems and then go through the books to solve it - like "i have a page and i want to capture email addresses into a database" or "i want a slideshow on my homepage using script"

 

this will give you a good footing in either approaching a company, or doing stuff for yourself

 

Darren

 

 

------------------------

http://www.darkoptics.net

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