Eskymo

Myself and most people I know in the business either taught themselves, or learnt on the job - don't know of anyone with qualifications in web design. I think a passion for the work and an ability to do it well, as well as experience with clients/people/public is what you need. You show this through your portfolio of work - not a certificate. If you turned up at my door asking for a job with just a certificate but no examples of your work, I'd turn you away. But if you showed up with a portfolio of some really interesting projects or experiments and a passion for web design I'd invite you in for coffee and a chat whether you had a certificate or not. Once I decided I wanted to do web design many moons ago when I was unemployed I managed to get onto one of those 6 month New Deal training schemes which gave me access to a computer, a trainer with some basic HTML knowledge and lots of time. I spend everyday learning stuff and experimenting and making mistakes etc. The last 3 months of the scheme you could spend doing a placement in a company if you were lucky to land one - so I got on the phone and phoned every company I could think of and offered my basic services for free for 3 months. I managed to get a placement and ended up getting employed at the end of it...and I learnt everything I need to know to run my own business at that job - all the web design stuff as well as budgetting, marketing, admin, client relations etc. I've never heard of the CIW training and certification - what is that exactly - do you need to pay for it? There are lots of training course out there and if you have the money you could go on one, but they really do cram a lot of information into a small space of time, so if you can get one that you can tailor make that would be ideal. I can recommend UBIQ in London for that kind of thing. I did a couple of flash course with them years ago and the second one, I asked to be tailor made to a specific project I had to do so I could learn the scripting I needed to implement. It was one to one and was very intensive but I got a lot out of it. Also try and find out if there are any evening courses running - in Edinburgh up here in Scotland there are loads of evening classes you can do and they're set up by the council and run in conjunction with the univeristy/college timetables - so you may not find you can get onto anything now, but when the new term starts in September the evening classes start again. Phone up your local council and find out if there are any available. Most course run for about 10 weeks - 1 or 2 nights a week.

it's Ok, thanks for the reply, but I've opted for creating separate styles, but as they duplicate each other, I've combined them like this: h1, .greentitle { font-size: 100%; font-weight:bold; color: #006A71; margin-bottom: 10px; } h2, .greytitle { font-size: 90%; font-weight:bold; color: #999999; margin: 0; }

Hey I know it's important to order your heading tags in the correct order h1, h2, h3 etc but what I want to know is, if it's ok to have a h1 and a h2 tag in one div and then later on have another h1 and h2 tag...see the code to see what I mean: <div id="content"> <div class="left"> <h1>Latest News</h1> <h2>25 April 2007</h2> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Quisque et dolor et magna</p> </div> <div class="right"> <h1>Proin non nisi ornare leo rutrum facilisis</h1> <h2>Integer sed orci vestibulum in pede.</h2> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Quisque et dolor et magna</p> </div> </div> or is that a complete no-no? Just asking as if it's a no-no I need to create a new style for the latest news title and date but use the same styles as the h1 and h2 tags.

A little Logo History here: Logo Desing History A bit about logo trnds from the same site here: Logo Trends Logo resources on the same site: Logo Resources This site lists a lot of famous brands: History of Branding

if the gap is exactly 3 pixels - then that's a common IE bug, but I thought they eradicated that in version 7. 3 pixels of frustration 3 pixel bug and floats fixing the 3 pixel gap

nope...

Great article links jbladeus! I totally agree that these designs aren't really web2.0 - they're too over the top. The beauty of web2.0 designs is the subtlety and simplicity of them and the fine little details. These designs are too brash and loud: - the colours are too pronounced and over used - None of the rounded corners match and relate to each other and therefore fight against each other for attention - The drop shadows/glows are too harsh and heavy - the refelctions on the text of the logo are too complicated and 'busy' - the text in the logo, strapline and navigation isn't easy to read - the main copy text hasn't got enough contrast from the background - the gradients are too harsh rendering some of the text difficult to read Overall it's all a little bit overcooked for my liking. It's like you're trying too hard and wanting to use every effect in the book.

I LOVE HABBO - I got into it about 6 years ago when some friends of mine were living in London and we'd login into Habbo and meet up and cause chaos with all the teenies...haven't been on for a while though...I hope my wee Eskymo is still there.

I feel 25 but I'm older...but certainly not 138!

me? 25? nope. try again.

23! - Still Very Young in my book!

Those teenagers will regret staring at such bright colours when they get to my age!

I've just seen a load of stuff that my nephew would love - so I may well be a new customer soon!

nice site - took ages for things to load...but that might be my crap broadband - I live in a tiny village and 5.30 seems to be the time people get home from work and log on to the internet and it all starts chugging - very annoying. I have a friend who uses Cactushop for some of his clients as it used 'friendly URLs' which is better for SEO that the 'query strings' other ecommerce products spew out...but I don't know anything about ecomerce, so thats a stolen bit of wisdom from someone else. Your lack of sales might be because people are just not finding your products via the search engines.

not enough contrast - need something to counteract the bright colours as they make your eyes sore.

It's done with javascript - if you disable javascript and click on the links nothing happens - which isn't good. I don't write javascript so can't go into technical terms, but it's all doen with coordinates I think. So each link knows to move the page at a certain speed to a specifi destination.

yeah...I think he's gone, so it's safe!

bow down to Olivier's genius - he'll definitely be able to help you fix things...

try adding the text-decoration: none; to the hover state too

Try adding border="0" to the img tag and see if that gets ridd of the hover state...

It's very clean and simple and well laid out, but it's a bit boring and similar to so many templates out there. But I guess if you're not designing it for a specific client then it's a bit difficult as you've got no logo / colours / design guidelines to follow.

I use SPURL for my bookmarks - so they're stored online and I have access to them from any computer I'm using.

I've had an annoying week too - doing multiple changes to some web visuals, then being told the job was not going ahead, panicking as I've kind of already kind of spent the money, and then finding out the job is going ahead and doing more changes to visuals etc etc. Thanks god it's Friday and I can do my own stuff - Fridays are Eskymo days and I don't answer the phone or emails - bliss!

I'm not knackered either - bit of a night owl!

Did you get it sorted with the printers? Were they OK with the file. Don't worry - I didn't miss any lost - I just put it on pause every time.