June 11, 200818 yr One of my house mates friends came to see me today, he's on the same course as me but a year above (so he's just graduated). He wanted some help installing a random image changer on his portfolio website, I thought fair enough as he might not know any PHP as it's not a major part of our course if you don't want it to be. Anyway I set him up with the random script at my place and he went home to try it on his XAMPP installation. He told me he didn't know to place files into htdocs, again I thought fair enough server stuff might not be his forte. The thing that annoyed me most is that he didn't even know how to get an image to open in the browser (ie just making a hyperlink to an image file). On top of this he's building a portfolio website to advertise his business, but he's using a template he found on the Internet and just changing (and mostly breaking what was once semantic) code and images. He's taken out the back link and basically broke it enough to call his own. To emphasize that a so called web developer who advertises himself as such is stealing a template to make his portoflio, and doesn't know the first thing about web design or development. He also got my housemate to code most of his third year project in ActionScript. I feel like it's an insult to web designers and developers everywhere and giving us a bad name if this guy is able to call himself a designer.
June 11, 200818 yr that's a disgrace! Using a template for a portfolio site.... damn! He wants reprimanding in the strongest possible terms. How on earth did this guy graduate? And more to the point, how much confidence will you lose in your education?
June 11, 200818 yr Trust me, this is nothing. The company who owns the company I work for (confused much?) decided to bypass the in-house team I work in and outsource a huge project. Let's just say that the company they hired are all talk and no action. They obviously had an amazing sales-person because they charged many tens of thousands of pounds on this project, which this company happily paid for. It turns out the "web designer" then outsourced this work to 2 separate companies, one in India to do the website, and another to work on the content (not copy!). The end product was something that a) looked s*%t, didn't validate, c) had no regard for accessibility (a major requirement), just generally brought shame upon web designers everywhere. This company/guy is a cowboy who has no respect for the subject of web design and who just successfully ran off with a huge amount of money and left my team to pick up the pieces! So the moral of the story is that you should make sure your friend accidently loses his fingers in a horrific accident with a car door, or something along those line so he unfortunately can't design websites again Or you could just ignore it and make sure your work is top notch and be proud that you're cleaning up after these people and making the internet a better place
June 12, 200818 yr Author He passed the course the same way he made the website, by getting other people to do it for him or by ripping work from other places and a bit of blind luck. Usually if one of my friends is making a website I'll offer to take the reigns and walk them through it, or do it completely for them as it's portfolio work for me and easier for them. With this guy however... well you can see why I wouldn't .
June 22, 200818 yr Just see the Jamie Cressey/Jingle Designs thread as a case in point... Yeah... His case is probably a lot like this case. Sadly...
June 24, 200818 yr Education is how much you make of it. You can go throught most educations learning almost nothing. Especially with the current project style education. You can just ride along on the skill and work of other people. At my education teacher are mostly people who used to work in ICT and became a teacher after. These people are hardly experts at making sure everybody does what he/she has to do. Copy pasting is also a very easy way to get through such an education. It depends largely on your attitude, what you get out of your education.
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