I last blogged on 6th June 2010. A lot has changed in such a short time. As I blogged back in April 2010, I am now working for Strawberry, in Hull, and my skills have drastically improved.
Having being working on designing and building websites for over 8 years now, I have seen the web change at a very fast pace. Now, it seems to be gaining more and more momentum as more and more people get online. It’s an exciting career to be in. As things are changing so rapidly, it has definitely been a huge benefit being a part of a larger web team. At the time of writing this, there are six web developers/designers at Strawberry; Jamie Wright, Stu Greenham, Matt Woods, Adam Gilleard and James Greenwood. Although not necessarily a competition, it is always good to try strive to be the best you can be. And with the rest of the team picking up new skills, it’s always encouraging to try and keep up with the pace. If you fall asleep in the web industry for even a month, you’ll fall behind.
The biggest change I found when moving to Strawberry was the diverse skill set. Rather than having one or two people who are really good at everything, it’s a case of having many people who are good at a lot of things, and really awesome in certain specialised areas. Of the various times I’ve been unable to do something to the best it could be, I know there’s someone else there who can do a kick-ass job.
I’ve always been more of an all-rounder when it comes to my skillset. Over the last couple of years however, my skills in CSS, HTML, jQuery and PHP have grown at a fairly decent pace. Since being interested in web design since the age of 15, I stepped in to the developing stage straight off the bat. Although I don’t think that a web designer should be able to do everything, I disagree that someone can call themselves a web designer if they can’t write CSS and HTML. It can play a vital role when designing your site in Photoshop.
As I mentioned above, my jQuery skills have grown at a decent pace. When I joined Strawberry, Adam was pretty much the jQuery wizard. As I had only been writing jQuery goodness for a few months I was often pestering him for help. He then went back to university for a year, so it was the perfect time to just dive right in. As much as I like to use tried and tested plugins, I’ve never been a fan of the copy and paste method of ‘coding’. I like to learn, experiment and create. I’m now at a stage where I’ve begun writing my own jQuery plugins and slideshow functions. Sometimes, if time permits, it’s better to write your own code. You get a better understanding of how everything works. Plus, if you want to add features, you know your code so you know what everything does (hopefully).
I’ve been a huge fan of WordPress since it first came out. It still powers this site and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. When I started working in Hull, I met the giant that is ExpressionEngine (EE). Learning a whole new Content Management System (CMS), which wasn’t small by any means, led to a fairly steep learning curve. For certain commercial projects, it’s definitely a contender for top-dog CMS. Over the past year, my skills in EE have developed nicely. I’m now at a stage where I’m easily coming up with solutions to complex problems, and really pushing the boundaries of what the CMS can do; from e-commerce-like set-ups to multi-language websites. I wouldn’t have even considered anything like that possible about a year ago. As with jQuery, I’m now at a stage where I’ve written a few plugins. The latest one being a Twitter plugin that uses the OAuth authentication method to pull in Tweets (hopefully the blog post will be available on the Strawberry website very soon).
All in all, my skills as a web designer have drastically improved over the past year. Even a year ago I thought I was good at what I did. I’ve always liked looking back at my old work and having the thoughts of, “what was I thinking?” If you can look back at your work from a year ago and can’t do better now, there is a problem. Can’t wait to see what the future holds in the beautiful web.