While listening to the 200th Boagworld show the subject of how to get into web design/development came up. It seems to be a perpetual question, "do I go to University and get a degree or do I try and get a job and teach myself while working"?

The options now

From what was said by Chris Mills, who contributes to the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, and others a large number of the degrees and other courses available are not really up to date with current best practice. These courses are still often teaching table based layout and missing things like semantic HTML and accessibility.
This leads to students coming out at the end of a three or more year course with a large amount of debt and skills that would have been fine in 2000, but are somewhat lacking now.

Trying to get a job without higher qualifications has it's own issues, especially in the current economic climate. Web design companies tend to be small to medium sized business. They quite often don't have the time, money, culture or inclination to take on a person just out of school and let them learn on the job.
It takes a lot of resources to train up a member of staff and with the short amount of time a large number of us spend with any single employer, it can be seen as an expensive option for the agency.

Therefore you have the choice of spending up to four years doing a degree where they teach you out of date skills or you try to impress someone enough with your portfolio to employ you and hope your not just making tea for the next two years.

One of the things that has always interested me about the web, and developing sites for it, is the community aspect. This ability to build a community is not really available when writing normal application software, and although I have built my fair share of applications, it really doesn't fire my interest me in the same way as the web.

Creating a community to attract more visitors?

Since the transformation of xlevel.org.uk from the home of a few open source applications I wrote some years ago to a fully fledge blog I have been considering what it is that makes people have a connection to one certain website more than to another. So, it was with interest that I read an interesting article in the March issue of .Net magazine called "Attract visitors to your site".

In the article the author discusses a number of ways to attracting visitors, including fostering a community through allowing visitors to comment on blog posts. The interesting thing was that the example he used was actually an example of visitors voting for there to be no comments.

Recently, while working on an EPiServer CMS5 R2 website build I was required to lock down the editors rights. The project required users to only be able to edit and publish pages, not create or delete them.

Controlling an editors rights within Edit Mode, the full screen, Windows explorer like console, is not an issue. All you need to do is modify their access rights and remove Create and Delete permission from the Root folder down.

Unfortunately, the Direct On Page Editing, or DOPE, accessed on page from the right click context menu, does not seam to take any notice of this.

The standard EPiServer on page edit menu.

In September 1995 I started my first job in the IT world as technical support at a local university. The internet was young and I remember the first time I started a copy of Netscape, I was blown away. I just wanted to create my own pages, so I went on line and taught myself how to write HTML, JavaScript and classic ASP, and have been developing web sites and applications ever since.

I'm sure, like many other web developers and designers I'm often asked by people how to get started in this business. Obviously there is a lot more options and information around now than when I started out, but I think you can learn a almost all you need to know without paying a penny.

So here are 10 essential internet resources you should check out if you want to start a career in web development.

Converting HTML & JavaScript to an ASP.Net control

In the last post we created a image gallery control using HTML and JavaScript using the jQuery library. In this post we are going to take this control and turn it into an ASP.Net control that can be used in an ASP.Net website or web application.

There are number of steps we are going to have to go through to wrap the HTML / JavaScript construct we created in the last post and render it out from an ASP.Net control.

The control needs to allow the web site designer to be able to modify various settings, such as the period between image changes and the fade out time. It needs to allow definition of the different images within the array and, lastly, render the modified the HTML and JavaScript.