Following on from my earlier blog post about universities not teaching relevant web design skills, Opera and Yahoo apparently feel the same, and have come together to launch the Web Standards Curriculum.

It’s an entire standards-based web design course - free online to anyone, and covers HTML, CSS, Javascript and more. 

Well done to those concerned for taking the time to develop what is a great starting point for not only students (who can supplement their “formal” education, and teach themselves the right skills), but also teachers and businesses as well - able to use the resource to improve their current methods etc.  Let’s hope the universities and schools catch up quickly.

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Anybody watching Wimbledon last night can’t help but admire Andy Murray, and his epic performance against the French number 1 - it really was one of the superb comebacks of the sporting world.

With no “Home Nations” in the football this year (and even Martin’s Italy didn’t have the best campaign), it’s great to see Andy doing the Scot’s proud - lets face it - on the sporting front, we don’t often have much to cheer about (with the exception of me winning the EURO2008 office sweepstake)…  Plus, it gives us a great excuse to mention the website we did for Andy’s Main Sponsor - Highland Spring.

Go Wiild with Andy Murray is a competition “microsite” developed for Highland Spring giving users a chance to win a Nintendo Wii, as well as play tennis with Andy Murray himself…  Although based on last nights performance, best of luck to you!!

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Having recently interviewed a number of Graduates for a Web Development assistant position, my concerns over the formal teaching of web design in our Colleges and Universities have not exactly been alleviated.

While I’d fully expect to see some sort of “skills gap” between those candidates straight from university, and those with a little real-world experience, it is the size of that gap that continues to worry me.

I’d like to stress that all our recently graduated candidates were bright, intelligent and talented individuals, all with (or about to get) good degrees - they are not at fault - but I fear the institutions teaching them, and preparing them for a career in web design are letting them down.  

One or two actually hinted at being fully aware that what, and how they were taught was not “recent”, and that they knew they’d need to learn new skills immediately.  We had 1 guy interview who was entirely self taught, and said the only reason he did his university course was to get the bit of paper that  confirmed he could do it.  He then went on to say that he was actually worried that during the 3 years formal education he might actually “un-learn” all his good habits with the bad habits he was being shown.  By bad habits he was referring to things like table-based layouts, ignorance of semantic markup, and lack of standards or css.  All quite worrying stuff…

I recently did a lecture to the School of Computing and Creative Technologies within the University of Abertay, Dundee, to an audience of Computer Arts and Web Design Students.  At the time I was really encouraged by the enthusiasm and feedback from the lecture hall, which later spilled out into the café - the majority were genuinely interested, asked some great questions, and left me with a positive outlook on web design (and technology) education.  So clearly the passion is there, I just hope it’s backed up by the teaching of relevant skills. 

Personally - if I were a student considering my options for web design and development at University or College, I’d be damn keen to interview them - not the other way around.  Challenge their bold statements on their websites about “web standards” and “advanced web authoring” and get down to the detail about what you’re actually going to teach me.  Show me a <TABLE> and I’m gone.

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It never continues to amaze me just how many (so called) web design companies I see offering a “5 page business website for just £295″ (or some other nice price plucked from thin air).

Are they serious?  Unfortunately - most of them probably are.

Long gone are the days when websites were sold by the page - promoting this now simply advertises the fact that as a web designer, you are building sites using old out of date methods with little concern for the client.

Most websites are designed around 1 fixed structure and layout - of course this may vary at times, and the design of the homepage may appear visually different, but essentially - every website follows (at least it should) a consistent design and layout.  So - design and code the “framework”, give the client access to a Content Management System (CMS), and allow them to create as many pages as they like.  Limiting them to 5 “static pages” (where the designer has actually spent 95% of their time designing ONE PAGE and 5% copying the code over the remaining 4) means when they need even just 1 or 2 exra pages, it’s back to the designer and more “per page” fees.  Even just to make a few simple edits (a change of text or some images) it’s often a case of more fees and waiting for the designer to get round to it.

We see so many clients here in the Glasgow office, who come in asking questions such as “how many pages do I get?”, and once we explain that webdesign no longer works like that - for most of them, it’s almost a lightbulb moment.   So while you may think that “5 pages are more than enough”, and “why should I pay more”, consider the future and the expansion possibilities for your site.  High Quality, Accessible, Business websites are still available for budget prices - our NSBuilder package proves that - just don’t get into a situation where you’re forking out ridiculous extra fees for an extra page or a 2 minute job to fix a spelling mistake.  If your current site doesn’t allow YOU to make these changes (at no cost other than the time it takes you) then perhaps time to think again.

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