I have been into web design for the last five years. It started when I thought that making websites was a really skilled job that would wow people into thinking I was super-smart. I came home from school one day and went straight to Notepad and started learning and coding HTML. Later that week I had created “Suckamoon”, a no defunct website that for some reason all the cool kids in my town decided to frequent. In fact, there were a lot of “…moon”’s on my MSN list at the time - it became some sort of cult.
Anyway, that’s where I began. I would make websites for local bands (I became “Sam, that guy who makes websites”) and I got my GNVQ in IT and went to college. There I did a National Diploma in Web Development (amongst other core subjects, such as networking, hardware, human-computer interaction, programming, systems analysis, etc). I was taught C/C++, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Flash, HTML and CSS. By this point I had decided where I was going with my education, and possible career, and that was more to do with the World Wide Web, so I began to look into other technologies such as PHP, SQL, ASP, XML, XHTML, and so on.
So, once I had finished and qualified from college I enrolled specifically on a web design course, Edge Hill’s BSc (Hons) Web System development to get that bit of paper that tells prospective employers that I can do what I say I can do. Yet the first year didn’t teach me anything. I was taught Microsoft’s Visual Basic .NET, and I could help but think “I know what I need to know from .NET, and I have no intention of developing software, and if I was to do so I wouldn’t use this software…” - needless to say, I haven’t touched it since May.
That was just an introductory year, and the marks don’t count, and I covered some old ground, and learned a thing or two about Data Flow Diagrams. But now I’m in my second year, and the fact that I am leaving education (more than likely) in 18 months is even more worrying - I look at what I have to learn, and what I will know when I come out, and it doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I should come out of university with a pretty good understanding of the Internet, networks, Microsoft Access /SQL databases, HTML/CSS/XML/ASP based websites, Macromedia Flash, e-commerce, Windows/Unix based operating systems, usability, interaction design, business organisation and the visual basic programming language. Yet this isn’t half of what I need to know.
It’s pretty apparent to anyone with any idea about the Internet that it is built on one thing. Open Source. The majority of web servers, and therfore websites, run on Unix based operating systems, and run Apache, and under Apache they run two things: PHP and mySQL, which renders my years priming for the Microsoft .NET way useless.
Well, I realised this a few years ago, so I took it upon myself to learn the basis of both of these technologies, but my limited knowledge doesn’t get me far (“Jack of all trades, master of none…”) so this year I am pushing what I can learn to a new depth. But there is a lot to learn.
I figure a logical step would be to stop learning everything I don’t really need to learn: that’s software programming languages, and those specialist languages used for plug-ins and extentions. The I guess I’m not going to read any more about things I am already pretty good at: CSS, navigation, design, security, usability, etc. But the list of subjects I am going to study is pretty mamoth: XML, AJAX, relational databases, PHP, SQL, etc. A book a week. A book a week…
And I always say that the best way to learn is by doing, so expect a lot of websites.
