I am a newbie to web design (just learning html), and am thinking of doing a career change, but am not sure where to start. I am currently self-learning html, and am thinking of doing some volunteer work for non-profit organizations, working with their websites to gain some experience. It seems a certification in Dreamweaver may be a good first step as far as “official” certifications, but the difference between the ACA and ACE levels is not entirely clear - do you need to do the ACA before the ACE, or can you do the ACE directly? Is there any use to doing the ACA as an adult - it seems to be geared towards students? What languages, technologies, certifications, etc. would set me up best to get started towards a web career?
My advice (carefully noting that I’m not a web designer at any kind of professional level) would be to consider learning to implement, configure and maintain one of the popular content management systems (CMS) - such as Joomla or Drupal, then offer a packaged ‘create a small business website’ service, where you order the necessary hosting and domains, set up the CMS, create and configure the templates, enter a few bits of content, then hand it over to the customer, thereafter charging them an annual support fee.
Yep, I’m a professional web developer, but I’ll echo Mangetout. “The industry” has well and truly moved on to Content Management Systems (CMS) for creating/maintaining websites. Given career change is your motivation, bring up your favourite jobs website and search for Joomla, Drupal and WordPress to get an idea of which of these CMSs will make you the most employable in your local area.
Of course, don’t quit learning hand-written HTML and CSS either - CMS’s can’t (yet) do it all for you.
Another content system is e107, I would also suggest the site Search Engine Watch.
This will start you on the correct direction. Too many designers don’t incorporate SEO (Search Engine Optimazation) in their design techniques.
Also since you’re learnign HTML make sure you’re also learning XHTML, so you can do the sites to standard and also don’t forget to check out HTML5. Here’s an interesting site to let you know what the next generation of HTML will be like
As others said, content managment is where things are headed today. Even if you find people willing to start from scratch, they may have preferences for Dreamweaver.
Ultimately finding jobs is going to depend less and less on certifcation but on your portfolio.
So go to GoDaddy or 1and1 and get a small package. Get a business sounding domain name, and start making your site. You can get a decent package for less than $10 a month and a domain name for $8 a year on 1and1
'Cause when you go for a job you can have sites set up that you did. This is what employers will want to see.
I’d recommend against 1 and 1 - I currently use them and there’s something weird and nonstandard about their PHP and Apache setups that makes all sorts of stupid workarounds necessary. I’ve had some utterly atrocious customer service from them too (I intend to drop them when I can organise myself to do it)
I believe jjimm had lots of good things to say about Dreamhost.
Additional feedback:
As a programmer who does a lot of web work on the client and server side (and a lot of interviews) I’d encourage you to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Really learn them. I encourage you to do it without the use of a tool like Dreamweaver. I’d even avoid the big JS engines (YUI, Prototype, jQuery) to start out, though they are good skills to have. I’m just a “basics first” kind of guy (and get off my lawn).
When I interview folks for jobs I look at work they’ve done (your idea of working with non-profits is good), and what they know (I ask questions or present problems). It’s usually very clear that the folks that rely on tools are the least capable when it comes to fixing something. (For me, the ratio of creating:maintaining is probably 1:10 so “fixing” is more important to me.) I look for folks that can debug, troubleshoot and find elegant, long-lasting solutions; not short term hacks that may break in the next browser update, or don’t work cross-platform.
I personally ignore certifications for the most part. I prefer to assess a persons skills myself.
I do web design for a large branch of the government. CSS and SEO are really big things to be very good at. I’d also suggest knowing JavaScript and, perhaps, JQuery. Basic HTML isn’t so big. (We work in ASP.Net and C# with our legacy sites being in VBScript and ASP). I honestly can’t think of any websites that I have seen that used straight basic HTML. At least not in the past 15 years.
I’ve never had any experience or use for CMS, but maybe that’s the way private businesses are going, I just don’t know.
I have never seen any companies use Dreamweaver or any other “drag and drop” web designing software so you may be wasting your time with those, unless you want to be self employed. In my experience they have a very limited use.
I would also suggest that you familiarize yourself with SQL and database management as well as practicing your debugging ability.
I agree.
Most certification courses (especially those with a company name attached) are mostly about indoctrinating the attendees into unquestioning use of that product.
Be forewarned if signs point to Joomla in your area. Joomla is conceptually very different from a user-centered system like WordPress - it needs you to plan everything before you build anything. For every object you want to build, an empty category has to be activated first (sometimes more than one).
AIUI (and maybe I don’t), Joomla is designed to be flexible and powerful, not so much intuitive. If you try to build something right out of the box, it will drive you a little nuts.
For anybody considering site building at this point (I did, briefly), the important thing is to really know what’s under the hood. It comes down to the skills employers always value most - abstract logic, meticulousness, and systematic thinking.
It may also be helpful to think of “web design” as a series of interconnected specialties that also may overlap. For example, you may have a copy writer, a graphic designer, a programmer, the SEO expert and the layout/content management person (the one who is necessarily using HTML). Some people can do two or three of these and others specialize. (And many, many more people only think they can do two or three of these things).
As you’re plotting out a future career in web design, think about how these things appeal to you. If you like SQL or PHP, those are awesome skills to add to HTML. Or you might beef up on Photoshop or Flash to go along with the HTML. Both people will be valuable as web designers, but they’ll take on different kinds of projects or play different roles within a project.
And a warning: at some point about a year into your career in web design, you will believe that you are God - that you have realized some amazing level of talent and that all those “more experienced” people don’t really know what they’re talking about. You can do anything faster, better, cheaper. When you get to that point, just force yourself to shut up. Given another couple of years, you’ll realize just how much more you have yet to learn.
Awesome post, dracoi. And well said.
Knowing HTML does not a Web designer make, just like owning a car doesn’t make you able to drive. But, you gotta start there.
I’d say learning basic PHP is essential nowadays, as well as beginning with MySQL, (and some flavour of Linux if you ever want to do more than just upload files to server) - lots of CMSes are based on LAMP architecture, and those are the (IMO) easiest flavours of the “M” and “P” to learn. Learning to use Joomla/Drupal/whatever is all well and good, but you’re not going to go far just relying on the available scripts and plugins without some tweaking.
HTML5 is going to be essential very soon, too.
I think SEO is overrated.
Me too, assuming you’re talking about the aggressive kind that includes spamming blogs, farming inbound links (including the creation of sites and blogs with cloned content just for the purpose of farming links), and other brute-force schemes like that. Overrated - usually only highly rated by those selling it.
‘Organic’ SEO, which consists largely of making your site the best, most relevant and interersting that it can be, proper coding, functional sitemaps, and establishing two-way links with genuinely like-minded and willing sites etc, is worthwhile, although I’m not sure I’d really call it SEO anyway, because it’s what webmasters should just be doing by default.
Exactly so. We are of an accord.
Yes, SEO is over-rated but people still ask for it and people still pay for it. And, if your competitors do it and it works for them, you sort of have no choice but to do stuff similar to what they are doing in order to compete.
Know thine enemy…know your basic organic SEO but also know what everyone else is doing in case you have to do it too. You can’t get a job with a place that wants to hire you to do aggressive SEO and your answer is “Oh, I don’t do that. SEO is overrated.”
I guess. But I would not work for such a company, if there was any choice at all. (Because aggressive SEO is making the web shitty)
I always tell them:
“I can do that – but only half of it. I can do SEO to get them to the website one time. But you have to have enough good content on it for people to stay there. Otherwise they’ll click away within a couple of seconds if they don’t find information that is valuable to them. And it’s literally true – people searching on the internet will only give your site a few seconds of attention before looking to click away – they are very impatient. So I can get them to the website, but your people have to keep them there with good information.”
It doesn’t do you any good to have people find your website, and then click away because it’s not useful.
That makes them think a bit more about their website, and what they want visitors to do there (become customers, usually), and what info they have to have on their website to keep people there.