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

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.

I agree this can be a little confusing. The up to date version of Compass is 1.x, which is compatible with Sass 3.3 and has been around for a while but needs to be installed by ( gem install compass --pre ), you can find it on the master branch of its github repo. It's much more powerful than the current stable version which relies on Sass 3.2.

The difficulty is that the lead dev (Chris Eppstien) is also one of the main devs of Sass, and they've been hard at work on releasing Sass 3.4. I'm sure once this falls, attention will be refocused on releasing the newer version of Compass as the stable version.

Compass 1.x pulls in data from the same source as caniuse and global usage statistics, so any prefixes and legacy browser hacks are completely up to date, much the same as Autoprefixer.

It's also a lot less bloated, CSS3PIE and Blueprint have been removed and many modules have been rewritten.

But it is fair to say that Compass is much more than just a library of mixins.

If you need the docs for the newer Compass they're at http://beta.compass-style.org

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.

I got my first role 11 months ago,
 
At the time I knew Css, Sass, Html, JavaScript, jQuery and a little php and wordpress.
 
The first thing I was tasked with to learn was git, basic command line and less before I could be effective in any project. I'd say learn git because I was close to not getting the job because I didn't know git. Most agencies are using or should be using version control so learning git would be a very good thing.
 
You don't need to necessarily learn Less, I'd probably stick to Sass as more agencies are coding in that, and I'm in talks with our MD about dropping less for sass in future projects.
 
As citypaul said, attitude is vital, if you come across as excited and show a willingness to develop yourself, demonstrate good communication skills you should impress.
 
As for portfolio the kinds of sites I don't think matter, They want to see that you can code, my designs were awful, but they liked the code, and at the end of the day we have designers to take care of that. Take printouts of code examples. I created a load of functions in jsFiddle to show that I understand things, can write JavaScript functions without having to resort to plugins and so on.

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.

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.

A few things I'll add - I migrate WordPress websites from live servers to my local machine on a daily basis, I also migrate websites from our temp server to the live server once a project has been approved. The migration process takes little more than 5 minutes using the terminal and Git. -- The speed being dictated by the size of the database and connection speeds etc. So that part of the article is not correct.
 
The security thing - If you choose sensible usernames and passwords, and follow the correct security recommendations then the security is about as tight as the other common CMS systems and is being continually updated. That article would only ring true for users using the suggested 'admin' username which any sensible person wouldn't. Obviously it's not going to be as secure as something like a Bank, but then they won't be using a CMS it will all be coded from the ground up.
 
Plugins - Yes there are many bad ones out which is unfortunate so this part is partially true, This isn't a problem if you are very selective with your plugin usage. We only use Advanced Custom Fields and SEO by Yoast. These are professionally coded and regularly updated and in 99% of cases will not be affected by a WordPress update.
 
SEO - That is a ridiculous comment, you have FULL control of SEO through WordPress - most of which is content based anyway. Our agency's homepage is built on WordPress and is #1 for the term Webbyrå (Swedish for web agency) in the country, seems odd seen as WordPress is so poor for SEO doesn't it?
 
 
Obviously for a huge scale application / website or shop we'd look alternatives to WordPress, However if you want to go for something super fast then a combination of Node.js and Angular would be faster than all the traditional PHP CMS systems.
For small to medium sized websites like a hotel then WP is just as viable as the other CMS systems so I don't quite get some of the hatred towards it.

In my opinion for anything other than very basic functionality I don't see the point in not using jQuery, developers are expensive and writing anything even remotely complex without such a framework will see a surge in costs - in both initial development time and maintenance. And you gain back a few KB on page load - about the same as an average image. And if you're using a popular CDN such as Google then most users will already have the library cached in their browser.
 
As for Angular I agree with Jack it is certainly not for beginners. If you don't FULLY understand objects, variable scoping and so on then you will not get very far at all. Angular being touted as one of the most difficult of the MV* frameworks to get to grips with. That said on larger scale applications something like Angular is the sensible way to go to keep everything nice and organised.

If you're asking this question you have not learnt HTML5/CSS. It's more complex than learning a few tags, selectors and properties. Just had to get that in.
 
The fundamentals of js/php are the same, so once you learn one of those it'll help with the other. jQuery is a library for js, like Codeigniter is for php. Ajax is a thing you can do with javascript, like responsive development is a thing you can do with css(see, you no knowy all cssy ).
 
Otherwise, just create something. You'll learn what you need to learn as you go. That will also dictate what route(front/back) you go down(most enjoy) too most likely. Don't just go off and start learning what someone has told you to learn next, it's inefficient. If you want to build a Notepad app, then sure, take suggestions based on functionality you need.
 
As you build something, you'll Google things like "how to make a slider", or "how to do two loops in Wordpress", then you'll develop a better understanding of what you need to learn vs. what you really need to learn. You'll also have things to put in a portfolio, something you'll without a doubt need to land a job in this industry.
 
You'll learn nothing but things you'll forget without practise. So just BuildSomething™.

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.

You could download this PC version of PhotoShop: http://www.techspot.com/downloads/3689-adobe-photoshop-cs2.html
[EDIT] Not sure if it will work with Win7 - It should - pls. report back if it does.
 
From what I have read (pretty extensively) it's absolutely legitimate! - but make your own mind up. For web page designing (if PS is your weapon of choice) I can't see that CS2 wouldn't be good enough - what else do you want it to do?
 
Personally I use InDesign, only because I regard it as a 'layout tool' that I know how to use and it's very easy to move objects around - afterall we are just talking about 'looks' not the nuts & bolts... Aren't we?

The BCS are an organisation that represents and offers services to IT professionals. They also moderate and consult on a number of university computing courses. They were pretty well thought of when I worked in the business IT world 10 years ago.
 
What you have posted is a pretty standard syllabus for a degree level computing course. It looks pretty similar to what I was studying in 1998, although I'm sure the course material will be more up to date.
 
As I said above - much of that material is not directly relevent to front-end web design. If your plan is to study full time in a UK University there are a number that now offer courses specifically based around web development, for example:
 
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/?view=CourseDetail&code=UUSWDD1
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/courses/bsc_web_design_development.php
 
There are many others. I don't know anybody who has done one though.
 
You'll need to give us some more information about yourself and your goals if you want more advice.
 
Dorian

It really depends on what kind of learner you are, what time commitments you have, what your budget is, your age, all kinds of things.
 
Some people find that the academic route is best for them, as it provides a highly structured curriculum with regular testing and access to tutors who will be able to work with you on a one-to-one level, as well as the opportunity to network and make friends etc. However, it is very expensive in the UK now and you will find that much of the teaching material is years out of date compared to what it being used in the industry.
 
Alternatively, online resources like Treehouse and Codeschool offer very targeted and up to date courses that you can get through in your own time, while keeping a roof over your head by doing other kinds of work. The downside is that they do not offer anything like the same deep background in the fundamentals of computing and software development that will enable you to study more complicated subjects and work in different sectors of the IT industry.
 
If 'web designing' is your main career goal then much of what is taught on the BSc Business IT course you reference would not be immediately relevent to you and you might find it frustrating. On the other hand, web development is getting more complex all the time and, unless you want to specialise in the graphic/design end of things, you will need to have a good grasp of how databases, servers, and networks work to get into the more techical aspects of it.
 
The most important thing is to figure out what you want to acheive and what kind of education you are best suited to. Also, if you haven't already, start looking at job adverts for positions that might interest you - what qualifications and experience are they looking for?
 
I'm fortunate enough to have done full-time and part-time academic courses and been on a graduate IT training scheme, and had a few years working as a software engineer before getting involved in web development. I'm still studying constantly and things like Treehouse work very well for me as I don't have the time to commit to any more academic stuff.
 
Good luck with making your decision - I'm sure that with hard work and perseverence you will achieve your goals whatever route you take.

You might want to get some stats on what is making your site not load as fast. Page speed test: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
This is really handy tool! One tip hat really does help is hosting your common JS/CSS files on a CDN (example: jQuery)

Nice site, text on tthe navigation is too large but nice for the rest.
 
 
Nice, perhaps icons on the category links to spice it up a bit.