DorianBass

I might have read your post wrong, but if you are trying to get a job at a web design agency without any relevent qualifications or commercial experience you will need a good portfolio of sites/designs you have made and a great deal of enthusiasm to even get a telephone interview or a call back from a recruitment agency. Junior positions that offer the amount of training you are looking for are highly sought after these days, there are a lot of young (and not so young) graduates trying to get into this business, and people looking to make the move from freelancing to something more stable. Interviewers are usually pretty sharp - they will grill you about your experience and future plans. If you are planning to hot foot it back to your freelance business after costing them 1000s in training and staff time and before you add any value to their business they will pick up on this, unless you are a very good liar. Also, don't assume that any agency you work for will be cool about you taking freelance projects on. They certainly don't allow it where I work. Best of luck with your future. This is a tough business to get into, but very rewarding in my experience. Dorian

Lots of interesting points coming up here! It's good to hear what people are using as alternatives to Wordpress, and some of the criticisms coming up seem very common to those of us who come to these things with more of a 'traditional' developer's perspective. I've come across a lot of sole traders doing WP sites who are mainly designers or marketing people, and they use themes and plugins for everything. I suspect some of these people are going to struggle in the future as site-generating tools like Squarespace continue to improve. One thing I've noticed is that clients and users really love the Wordpress admin, although I personally find it a bit annoying. Chris Coyier has been very vocal about not migrating CSS Tricks from Wordpress, but even though that site has a lot of content it's still basically a blog. Its a great resource, but I would argue that some bits of it are getting a bit unwieldy, and if he had to actively maintain all that content I'm not sure that would be realistic with WP. It interesting that he has talked recently about using Jekyll to do some new sites.

Like you I was very sniffy about Wordpress for a long time and refused to use it. Recently I've begun to mellow and used it for a couple of sites and been pleasantly suprised. As rbrtsmith says, a lot of the performance and security issues with Wordpress are caused by the overuse of plugins and general lack of awareness (e.g. there are various processes which only make sense for blogs and can be easily turned off). Like all development tools, it takes a bit of experimentation to find the right workflow and decide which bits of it we're going to use and where its just simpler and more flexible to code things ourselves. My personal view is that Wordpress is not suitable for large projects or sites with a complex data model. Its a bit weak on the database side, even with Advanced Custom Fields.

A better reply than mine I think CSS is confusing enough already. No sense adding declarations that we don't need... Dorian

Add text-align: center to the menu class Change .menu li a to display: inline-block Get rid of the floats from .menu li a and .menu li a span That ought to do it. .menu{margin:0 auto; padding:0; height:30px; width:100%; display:block; text-align: center; background:url('topMenuImages.png') repeat-x;} .menu li{padding:0; margin:0; list-style:none; display:inline;} .menu li a{padding-left:15px; display:inline-block; color:rgb(5,5,5); text-decoration:none; font:12px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; cursor:pointer; background:url('topMenuImages.png') 0px -30px no-repeat;} .menu li a span{line-height:30px; display:block; padding-right:15px; background:url('topMenuImages.png') 100% -30px no-repeat;} .menu li a:hover{background-position:0px -60px; color:rgb(255,255,255);} .menu li a:hover span{background-position:100% -60px;} Dorian

Thanks Wynn, that's very helpful. What made things even more confusing was that I tried to update Susy at the same time, and hadn't realised there was a new version which needs SASS 3.3. That's what you get for relying on the same dev stack for too long!

You also need to be a bit careful about installing SASS and Compass these days, since the current versions of each are not compatible with each other (as I discovered the other day when I updated my version of SASS and it completely broke Compass). If you just install Compass (i.e. gem install compass) it will pull in the version of SASS it needs to use. A number of high profile web developers, including Ben Frain (who wrote a book about it) and Chris Coyier have stopped using Compass as they are now compiling SASS with Grunt and using Grunt plugins like Autoprefixer to add css vendor prefixes during the build stage (which used to be a big selling point for Compass). Food for thought.

I got through the first year of an MSc in Computer Science before I got a job as a graduate trainee. It was helpful for me because my degree was in a non-IT subject. If your undergraduate degree is is related to web development and you've already been freelancing for a while I'm not sure what the benefit of a masters would be, unless you want to teach or do academic research.

Another vote for TSOhost. I've personally found their tech support guys to be very helpful. One great service that they offer is a free migration of your sites from other hosts. They don't just copy the files over but create databases and change all the usernames and passwords in your code etc. It was so easy to do that I ended up moving several sites over from other hosts, and now I can access everything from one account, which is great.

This is definitely the best way to do it. However, it does require you to have both SSH access to the server and GIT installed on there (unless I've misunderstood?). Neither of these are possible with the shared hosting account I currently have my sites on, hence my dependency on GIT FTP, which at least means I don't have to upload every changed file one at a time - that really would be a ballache.

I'm currently using GIT for version control on my local server, and GIT-FTP, an open source shell script which I run from the command line with the command: git ftp push after testing and commiting my chages locally. This very handy utility will identify only the files which have changed since the last commit, and FTP them to your remote server using login details stored in your git config file. Check out the project here: https://github.com/git-ftp/git-ftp If you have admin rights on your remote servers you can install GIT there and set up post-update hooks to keep it in sync with your local environment (lots of tutorials around on how to do this). You could also look at Beanstalk, which is a paid-for code hosting service a bit like GitHub. Beanstalk offers a range of deployment options and is very highly recommended by Chris (css-tricks) Coyier and many others: http://beanstalkapp.com/

Thanks rbrtsmith. That's really helpful. I'm planning to start applying for Dev jobs once the summer touring season is over. It takes me quite a long time to do a site because I'm not really a designer, and I'm quite fussy about wanting things to look good before I release them. I know I can code though, and I've got quite a few things on Codepen that I can use as examples.

This is a good topic. Anybody want to suggest how many sites you should have in your portfolio before starting to apply for jobs?

I've been very impressed with Treehouse. They've clearly put a great deal of work and research into their service, and it really is a very different learning experience from just ploughing through free material on blogs and developer sites. I've been on the Basic membership for a while and been very happy with it. However, there are a number of courses I want to do eventually that are only available for Pro members so I will have to upgrade at some point. I have to juggle web development with other work, music and childcare and don't have as much time for studying as I would like. Because Treehouse courses are so modular I can just dive in whenever I've got a free hour and pick up right where I left off. It's very efficient.

Congratulations on the work you have done so far to get yourself into this enviable position. You have 4 intriguing possible opportunities at stage in life when most people have no idea what they want to do (assuming that you are 18/19 at the moment). Huddersfield is a fun place to go to University - I did my undergraduate degree there (about 100 years ago...). In your position, I would at least consider asking the university to hold your place for a year while you take advantage of one of the jobs you have been offered. That way you won't lose out on anything, will gain a huge amount of useful experience, and can decide to leave Uni for a while if you like things where you are. At the grand old age of 40 I certainly don't regret going to University but I do regret that I went so young (right after A levels). If I had spent some time working first I would certainly have been more focused, had less growing up to do, and probably have chosen a different course. Friends who work in the University sector tell me that the older students almost always work harder and take more adantage of the opportunities available to them. Another factor to consider is the huge costs associated with going to university these days. I left with far less debt than the average student does now, and it still took me years to pay off. Studying part time while you work (which I have done in more recent studies) is a good way of balancing things and it seems that many peope are choosing to do this at the moment. Good luck with your decision - let us know what you do!

I would echo the advice of posters above - SASS, LESS CoffeeScript etc. are tools that many people find very helpful, but only once they have got a really solid understanding of the technologies that lie underneath them. I appreciate the frustration of spending so much time getting to grips with the basics while feeling that everybody else is doing all the hip new stuff. I remember it well myself. However, trying to learn frameworks before languages is a bit like teaching a child to use a word processor before it learns how to write, and it will get you into trouble later on. Its good not to get too hung up on frameworks - there are new ones appearing constantly and nobody has time to keep up with everything that's out there. Lots of developers don't bother with them at all. By the way, since you asked about Susy, it is a SASS framework that is used for creating flexible grids for responsive websites. Its a bit of a time saver, but it doesn't do anything that you can't code yourself with CSS and some simple calculations. Good luck with your studies. I'm sure you'll get there.

I've never seen a site built with Wix that I liked the look of, and I have seen some that had serious problems with their UX (for example unreadably small font sizes and navigation that didn't work properly). It produces code that is messy and unsemantic at best. However, I know several people (musicians and small business owners) that have created their own pages with it over the last couple of years and seem to be happy with them. Most of them were using it to replace older sites that they had paid other people to build several years earlier. The reality is that there are a lot of people out there who just want a very basic website for their business. They have no interest in, or budget for, creative modern and original sites. For this segment of the market tools like Wix are a very big deal. I personally have no problem with this trend, as in my experience these kinds of clients are a nightmare to work with and expect to pay peanuts. I would seriously advise against using it for a portfolio, mind. That's not going to give people a lot of confidence in your coding or design skills.

I just noticed that Code School have a free course on jQuery here: https://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-jquery That might be a good place to start.

Agree with the posters above. I'd really recommend learning a bit of jQuery, not just because it can be super useful for things like loading dynamic content with AJAX and form validation, but also because it helps to give you a wider understanding of the DOM and how browsers work. Although some sites will use 'vanilla' javascript over jQuery for performance reasons, its pretty rare to find a major site that doesn't use jQuery somewhere these days. Once you know what to look for you'll start seeing it all over the place. If you haven't done much programming before I'd recommend getting to grips with the basics of jQuery, then later on branching out into raw javascript and the HTML5 apis. The MVC frameworks are a step further again - you might want to leave that stuff for a while. The documentation at jquery.com is very comprehensive, but it can be a bit dry. There are lots of great courses out there if you want a little help to get started - Chris Coyier offers a nice one on 'The Lodge', which is a subscription only section of the css-tricks.com website. There are many others. Good luck!

Converting a static site into a custom wordpress theme can be a bit daunting if you haven’t done it before, although you’ll certainly learn a lot from doing it. If you’re into the idea of upskilling yourself, then another option for you could be to create a MySQL database on your web host and write some fairly simple PHP scripts to add and display your news stories. There are tons of tutorials around that can help you do this, for example: http://www.dmxzone.com/go/4114/creating-a-news-module-using-php-and-mysql/ Obviously there’s a bit of a learning curve if you haven’t done this kind of thing before, but lots of websites are still made this way and it never hurts to learn a bit about how things work ‘under the hood’, even if you go down the CMS route with future projects.

I did the Open University Certificate in Web Application Development, which took me 2 years part time and covered some of the same ground as the course you have enroled on. While it was very useful for getting me started, I probably wouldn't choose to do this kind of course again. Much of the material was extremely out of date, and it was frustrating to have to move at what I felt was a very slow and academic pace. I have learned a great deal more from online resources and just getting on with building websites for people. Your course will expose you to a lot of different elements of the web design/development process, which may help you decide what areas you want to specialise in. I would encourage you to make the most of the networking opportunities with your fellow students, and try to set up a Facebook group or some other way of keeping in touch after the course is finished. Finally - Java is less commonly used in small scale web development but it is HUGE in the enterprise programming world, and for building Android apps, and there are a lot of opportunities for Java programmers. Also, the object orientated principles you'll learn from looking at Java will help you with other back end technologies like PHP, Python, Node etc.

What drt_t1gg3r said. In your CSS set the containing element of your navbar to position: fixed; Assuming you want your navbar at the very top of the page, set left: 0; Setting a block element to position: fixed will take it out of the regular page flow. Without a width value it will just wrap around the content like an inline element so set: width: 100%; For the same reason you will need to add a padding-top: value to your main content wrapper (or whatever the next block level element is) which is equal to or greater than the height of your navbar, or they will overlap.

It depends on what kinds of SEO techniques you are talking about - certainly attempts to 'game' search engines to give you higher rankings have a very short shelf life, much less than 5 years in my experience, and may very well hurt you in the long term. My understanding is that the best way to get good search rankings, once you've got all your meta tags and site maps properly sorted, is to have really good content on your site that is frequently updated, and to have people talk about and link to your site on social media. How much of that is down to us, as designers and developers, to do for our clients is an interesting question.

Lots of good recommendations above - I'd say that Sass and Git are almost essential these days, if only because so many blogs and tutorials will assume that you are using them. Here's a more controversial suggestion: Wordpress, or some other well known content management system. Being from a database/programming background, I was very sniffy about using Wordpress for a long time but its becoming very hard to avoid. The nature of the modern web is very much content driven, and users expect the content to change frequently (as do search engines). It is not always desireable to be the only person who can update a site, even if you do have clients that will pay you to make very small changes. You can of course develop your own CMS functionality but, as I discovered to my cost recently, you can never be sure what kind of chaos clients are going to unleash when you leave them to it. The back end of Wordpress is under constant development and is pretty much bulletproof.

Thanks for the link - that appears to work just fine on Windows 7. I'll have to think about whether to switch over from GIMP, since I've got pretty used to using it, but its great to have something I can open PSDs with.