by Peter in Rants & Raves, Web Site Design
on March 5th, 2004 . No Comments »
PaperStreet Newsletter: So You Want To Be A Web Designer?
What should I put in my portfolio?
Web Sites. Duh! You need to have actual work. If you haven’t been hired by any clients on a freelance, internship or actual job basis, then you need to create fake sites to show off your talent.
OK. I have a bad ass portfolio. Where should I put it?
Online. Buy a domain name get a cheap hosting account and put everything you do online. In terms of costs, this will be one of your best investments. For only $50-$75 per year you can have your own domain name, email and web site. Not only will it look professional, but it will also be good experience in setting up a web site.
How should I structure my portfolio?
In terms of your web site, just make it your best work and put all of your other work in various categories (web design, print, logos, etc.). Try to organize items so that your potential employer or client does not have to search for your work. Basically do not get too wacky with the design. Make sure you put in your contact information somewhere on the site – preferably on each page.
If you really want to get wild, make your web site your own freelance company and you could easily pick up some extra client work and show off your business/design talent. To do this, simply add in various pages that are needed to sell your services, such as an about us page, client list, services, and any other pages you can think of.
How much time should I waste on creating my portfolio?
You need to spend as much time as needed to make your portfolio sharp. Create as many sites as possible. You should have various themes (i.e. tech, friendly, corporate, creative, and using all different color palettes). If you only have 2-3 web sites, then they better be good.
What format should I make my sites or concepts?
Fully functional web sites are best. However, its bad if you link to a client that suddenly went out of business or changed their site – so save a snapshot of the page as well. If you don’t have fully functional web sites, then at least have a fully functional home page with null links. If you don’t have any of that, then a full JPG version of the concept is fine, but no thumbnails.
Can I show off my print skills?
A print portfolio helps. If you have design talent, then that can be applied to any medium.
What skills do I need to pay the bills?
HTML, PhotoShop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, and FTP knowledge are a must. Flash is needed too.
If you know how to program in ASP, JSP, PHP, CFM or any other scripting language that is great. If you know how to make a database driven web site using a MySQL-PHP configuration, ASP-MS SQL, CFM-MSSQL, or any other configuration then great.
In general though you need to know a little bit about everything and become a master in one area. That will allow you to get a job in either graphic design, search engine optimization, internet marketing, database programming, general web design, content, usability, layouts, etc. However, if you know a little bit about everything it helps because you understand how all of the technologies fit together to produce a web site.
Personally I really don’t have little issues with IE6 these days… As a developer i've adapted to combining Standards with IE6 Support. I’ve gotten to a point where I know what’s not going to conflict and what is going to
I do however entirely disagree with the fact that nothing is going to change. I think we’ll see a huge drop in numbers over the next few months. A huge majority of IE6 users are based around corporate intranets, and if corporate offices can’t use Google docs or YouTube? That’s just crazy.
I think when people see a huge red box on Google (the most trusted website in the world) that instructs you to upgrade your browser. It’ll happen. I think a majority of people just don’t know any better, this will be a much needed shove in the right direction.
We’ll see, is a good stance. But I think when we decide its time, we should drop it all together. A majority of build time that happens to correct IE6 issues happens during the build process before IE6 is even looked at. Josh, Ariel, and I know we’re going to have to take an extra 30 minutes to make a certain element use all gif instead of pngs, or know that we have to put padding on floated elements and not margins. All of these precautions can be thrown out the window, and we can build in a more modern and quicker way geared towards Standards Based browsers only.
Not to mention beta IE9 with HTML5, CSS3, and W3C Standards is coming out this month… Every major browser will now support CSS3 and HTML5. Horrah!
Although PaperStreet may have 4.6% of IE6 users, the world still has a massive 17-20% market share. Statistically its gone down about 9-10% per year. So in December we’re looking at less than 10% of the world, if not more due to these giants dropping support.