I’m going to college, have been for 6 weeks, doing a web development HND. I’ve went back as a mildly mature student. To be honest, all we’ve done so far is piss about in photoshop and read html/css stuff from a book. While it’s early I have noticed that the stuff they’ve gave us to work on is straight from a book I bought from amazon for a tenner. It all feels like a proper waste of time especially as I’m juggling it with work and have a mini Boba on the way.

As I already have a good foundation in html and css, photoshop etc, is it too much of a jump to learn the rest at home instead? From what I can understand from research on the Internet, most people got into Web by teaching themselves or moving from another IT position (I’m already in support)

I’m speaking to the course coordinator today as I have many concerns about the course so I’m expecting to be kicked off after a swearing match

Edit* I’m not trying to take anyone’s job, all I want to do to start with is set up something small alongside work and maybe some freelance to get established, I’m also under no delusions that I’ll leave college tomorrow and be finished by Friday, I’m factoring in at least 2 years hard work

First q: Are you looking to learn to be a web designer or a web developer?

They’re different roles and require a different skillset – there’s not many people who have the right ‘mindset’ to be a creative web designer and a good coder.

Anyway, I think the advantage of an HND is that it gives you a recognized qualification to wave in front of a potential employers nose. It’ll probably get noticed more than someone asserting ‘I’ve taught myself at home’. Having said that if you can develop some sites and put them up on the web and then show them to potential employers you can maybe get around that to a certain extent.

Teaching yourself coding from a book is not easy. It’s like trying to learn a foreign language – it’s a lot easier if someone who knows it is there to help you along.

You’re also trying to learn html, css and I assume some sort of ‘backend’ language to enable you to do database queries etc? so it’s multiple languages, each with their own syntax.

It may be difficult but stick with the course, make sure you are doing a lot of work outside of the normal lessons before the baby arrives and use the lecturers to backfill the tricky stuff that you’re struggling with at home.

(Note: For once I feel this is an area I’m qualified to talk about – I’m the Development Director for a software company 🙂 )

Did something similar many moons ago – a couple of us went to a night class to learn another programming language as a means of improving ourselves. The course was a joke, even down to the lecturer letting us take our exam work home as it was over two sessions. He basically admitted they did the exam so they got some money from the government for eveyone who did the exam.

A recognised ‘certificate’ is going to better on the CV rather than ‘self-taught’ but if you’re realistic (as it sounds like you are) and already in IT then I’d just say go or it yourself – try and block out the same time as the course to do at home.

If you want stuff on the CV then maybe volunteer to do a couple of websites for maybe a local charity etc.

You don’t learn coding from reading a book – you learn coding by doing coding. The course has the advantage that you get a recognised qualification, but equally good for the CV I’d think would be a list of the websites you’ve built.

The course Is a joke make no mistake, we’ve built a website…… By copying her code from screen shots, no reasoning as to why we’re doing it.

That’s not even mentioning the nature walk we’ve been on

Can you talk to those a year above you and find out if it changes once you start doing project type work?

tbh, if you’ve lost faith in the staff and course content to that extent then you’ll probably not regain it.

Maybe try and find another local provider and talk to people on their course to see how it differs?

I do believe that learning to code in a vacuum (metaphorically) may lead you into a programming style that a professional would see as poor practice, though.

Check out some online training

http://www.codeschool.com and http://www.codecademy.com/ are very good

There’s also a free course on coursea on Human comouter interaction which explains a lot of the background work behind web design (perception, mental models, cognition)

https://www.coursera.org/course/hci

What i really love about code school is they have exercises you have to complete to get to the next level.

There are lots and lot of self taught web developers around, when we recruit we get gazillions of CVs of armchair experts. Some form of recognised qualification does at least mean you will (hopefully!!!) have fewer bad habits and should have a structured approach to how you tackle the work. We have had self taughts and they are more often than not a proper pain in the arm for our tech director as they have their ‘own way’ of doing things.

So, if you can find a resolution and stick with it you should benefit in the long run. Leaning at home in any free time (MiniFatt permitting) would also be good.

As was said earlier – design or developer – bit like oil and water, someone who can do both to a good standard is a rare commodity.

Good luck.

Cheers Tricky – I’ve done codecademy (HML/CSS/Jquery and working through Javascript)which is very good, really easy to follow.

Also working through:

HTML and CSS book by Jon Duckett……..which incidentally she gave us a copy of free

and

Sams Teach yourself HTML and CSS

If i’m honest, all the reasons I’ve given for jacking it in so far isn’t the only reason for my disgust in the college. We’re being treated like kids at school. Chastised if anyone’s late although she strolls in 20 minutes late ever day, has nothing for us to do, we’e meant to be mind-readers and get sent for 45 minute tea breaks and 90 minute lunch breaks bu god forbid if you try to leave 5 minutes early to catch our train to get home for the wife’s midwife appointment.

I may have talked myself into it

Sorry, should have said, it’s more the design end of the spectrum with a looooooong term goal of working for myself

I’d stick it out, just to get the qualification. Meanwhile, build a portfolio – do some free work for local companies or similar maybe?

Might also be a good idea to learn how github works, maybe a bit of javascript/jquery, etc.

If you’re looking at design then you *may* be mistaken in approaching it from the technical end of things.

Most designers I’ve worked with will tend to work primarily in photoshop etc, they don’t really ‘do’ serious coding.

Maybe given you’re not happy with the course you should sit down and work out where you want to be and then talk to people who are doing that role and see how they got there?

There’s loads of IT folk and designers on here who will be happy to give advice.

You don’t want to invest time and effort into a course or learning program that doesn’t prepare you for the career you want at the end of it.

I did multimedia IT at uni quite a while ago and the thing they were teaching us at the time was out of date . In the projects we just used the industry standard software at the time (macromedia director instead of toolbook, 3d Blender etc)

web design/development has come along way in the past few years. Definitely look into responsive design and some of the frameworks out there (bootstrap, foundation,gumby)

there are some clever browser based tools now that utilise these frameworks

http://www.divshot.com http://www.jetstrap.com https://webflow.com/ and something called http://macaw.co/ which a lot are getting excited about

If you’re good at design I would argue its fairly easy to plug those designing skill into a CMS like Drupal. That’s assuming you’ll be doing fairly standard websites. Anything more custom would require a fairly strong knowledge of PHP and javascript.

They’re different roles and require a different skillset – there’s not many people who have the right ‘mindset’ to be a creative web designer and a good coder.

Indeed. If someone is running a course and they think they can lump those two wildly different skillsets in together, then they clearly know sod all about either. I’ve never met a decent designer with the remotest interest, let alone the ability to code, and vice versa

If you want to be a designer, do a design course

Indeed. If someone is running a course and they think they can lump those two wildly different skillsets in together, then they clearly know sod all about either. I’ve never met a decent designer with the remotest interest, let alone the ability to code, and vice versa

an that’s where i think your wrong. Used to be the case that designers would just do mockups in photoshop but i feel times have changed. Our web designer needs to know about css, responsive layouts, how to integrate web fonts, and will often integrate jquery UI.

I know this has happened in some very small agencies. Designers have had to get their hands dirty and bit and use css.

Indeed. If someone is running a course and they think they can lump those two wildly different skillsets in together, then they clearly know sod all about either.

That pretty much sums up why i’m currently sitting here at college, not doing anything but have the time to post on here.

Apart from anything else, it’s costing me £150 a month in travelling expenses on top of what I pay to get to work that could be better spent on car seats and nappies

trickydisco – I know it has in smaller agencies, through necessity. But its far from the best solution IME. Do you honestly know anyone who’s good at both? I don’t. And I know a lot of good designers, and a lot of good developers. But they’re mutually exclusive.

And I’d definitely advise against trying to teach someone both at the same time, from scratch. I’d recommend concentrating on one or the other. Then once you’ve a good working knowledge of one, then maybe have a crack at the other.

I have a working knowledge, but more importantly a good appreciation, of CSS etc. Could I ever use it to anywhere near its full potential? Not a chance! So I stick with design, then hand it to someone who knows what they’re doing, in a format they can work with.

And I’ve seen developers attempts at ‘design’. Lets just say I’ve never felt threatened 😉

I know a lot of good designers, and a lot of good developers. But they’re mutually exclusive.

Yes and no. I don’t disagree that most designers are crap at coding, and vice versa – but I’d argue that any decent designer should have an idea as to what the code is doing (and can do), and that any decent developer should at least bear in mind that there’s a UI out there somewhere.

And I’ve seen developers attempts at ‘design’. Lets just say I’ve never felt threatened

I’ve seen designers code, and the feeling is mutual 🙂

As a developer who has worked with designers I can say I am crap at “design” and it is best left with them… except not necessarily interface design. Some designers can make it look very pretty but be completely unintuitive/impossible to use etc. Interface design is a skill that can apply to both roles.

If you have the choice I’d go dev over design just because (in my experience) when the axe is falling the designers go first because us devs can still knock something up!

Wow! This thread is starting to read like a transcript of a day in the office. 😀

Some designers can make it look very pretty but be completely unintuitive/impossible to use etc. Interface design is a skill that can apply to both roles.

I’d argue that in that case they’re not really designers, but more part of the marketing department.

If you have the choice I’d go dev over design just because (in my experience) when the axe is falling the designers go first because us devs can still knock something up!

No argument there, though! (Although by the sounds of it the OP is more of a designer than a developer…)

Agree with Binners. Serious web developing needs the input of both a designer and a coder. Two jobs. If you know somebody who does those two jobs well, I bet they are very well paid. Because they are doing two jobs. Most of the time, it’s one person dabbling at the other because their boss can’t (or doesn’t recognise the need to) afford to pay two people.

There are far too many unhappy designers spending far too much of their time not using their skills because they’re scratching their heads trying to work out something a professional coder could do in his sleep.

Good firms recognise these two separate roles. Whether they can afford them or not is a different matter. So the jack-of-all-trades can often find work where the master of one cannot.

In my experience, anyone claiming to know everything about the web doesn’t. The Dunning Kruger paradox runs deep in the industry. If you do know everything it’s because you’re one of the elite and obsessive few at the cutting edge, driving the technology forward. Everyone else plays constant catchup.

The course sounds like a waste of time. Whether you want to go through the motions or not comes down to how much you feel you need the qualification on your CV.

Web design and web development are two different roles requiring two different skill sets.

There is a cross over of skills in the middle, but generally speaking one who is good at web design is not going to be too good at web development, and vice versa.

In the same way automotive design is different to automotive engineering, or game design is different to game development.

Web design and web development are two different roles requiring two different skill sets.

100% agree.. but to be a good web designer you need to understand or have an appreciation of html and css. I’m not saying you need to develop 100% in it. or be an excellent hand coder. I’m saying it’s simply not good enough to do photoshop mockups anymore as they don’t translate to the web.

Go and take a look at web designer jobs on jobs sites and show me one that just want graphic design and photoshop skills.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/04/22/repurposing-photoshop/

trickydisco
100% agree.. but to be a good web designer you need to understand or have an appreciation of html and css. I’m not saying you need to develop 100% in it. or be an excellent hand coder. I’m saying it’s simply not good enough to do photoshop mockups anymore as they don’t translate to the web.

Go and take a look at web designer jobs on jobs sites and show me one that just want graphic design and photoshop skills.

100% agree back at you.

The best designer/developer relationships I’ve experienced (I used to be a UI designer for Sega) have been similar to what I imagine a good architect/builder relationship is. There needs to be a healthy overlap of knowledge, a healthy respect for each other’s skillset and a very distinct idea of where one’s own skills start and end. Each party needs to know when to pull rank, and when to STFU and be told.

I also think there should always be a healthy level of tension. The designer has the brief to answer to, the developer has the technology to answer to. Where these two answers collide is where the work actually happens. If there isn’t that tension it’s usually because the relationship is uneven, with one side too powerful or complacent.

The trades need each other to flourish, which is why it pains me to have watched so many of my fellow designers get dragged into the world of code where they are simply not cut out to operate.

Not knowing which route to take to get into making websites feels a little bit like saying “I want to make buildings – shall I go down the construction route or the architecture route?”. You’d probably know the answer to that long before you needed to settle on one or the other.

So often designers are reluctantly compelled to get into developing because they’re worried for their long term employment prospects and hope to future-proof themselves. Actually, in the long term I feel they’ll likely find that what they’ve done is neglected to develop their own skillset in favour of playing distant, third rate catchup to a bunch of dedicated specialist professionals who actually wanted to do that job from the start and weren’t distracted by trying to do somebody else’s entirely different job as well as their own.

Unfortunately, at industry level that desirable tension I spoke of above is undermined by the sheer disposability of designers. We’re ten-a-penny. If you don’t want to learn how to be a coder as well as a designer, somebody else will.

It’s a shame. In this buyers market where designers are plentiful, the best designers are in theory those few who actually have jobs. And it is they who are being dragged into code for fear of losing them. So the industry compromises many of its best design minds and loses them to the lower echelons of development, which inadvertently lowers the average ability within development accordingly. Nobody comes out of that well.

I’ve done it both ways. I know which way I found more rewarding, more productive and more profitable.

From another PoV – I’m an experienced developer; I took a supply contract at a local college to makes ends meet after being made redundant – TBH I didn’t enjoy it very much, though I was experienced on the developer side of things, I wasn’t so hot on the teaching skills.

Possibly the lecturer is out of their depth? or the college gives her material taht reflects the outcomes they expect? I had a huge variety of students, from keen, ‘mature’ students (yourself possibly) but they in turn were on a course that was really hard for them to relate to; and young wizz kids that had good general computing skills but next to no commitment, no notion of doing any coursework outside lecture time and made sloppy mistakes, or simply copied work.

My time was spent fire-fighting both ends of the spectrum.

The college weren’t that supportive – of anyone really – and I packed it in quite soon…

I spoke to the lecturer.

Thankfully things ramped up his morning and she’s admitted to me that she was disappointed that some people on the course has never used Photoshop so they’ve had to do a bit of a crash course for them

So I’m going to stick i out at the moment ad have worked out a deal where I don’t need to come in if I’ve done what she’s asking

A designer can create a UI from scratch on paper first, then in Photoshop, and eventually translate their design/layout to code.

A developer can solve a solution on paper, then in code. They can also take a Photoshop design/layout and turn it into code.

Very very few people have both sides – but they do cross over.

From experience, I have often found web designers are graphics artists who are keeping up with technology (they can still design in photoshop, but use the web browser as a medium instead of paint I mean print!). Equally, I’ve often found programmers taking to the web instead of building Applications targeted at operating systems, as it’s very cross-platform.

The coders we use always ask us to use the templates from this guy

And the UX guy we use for bigger projects told me to read this so we can tackle the smaller ones ourselves.

If you’re looking at design then you *may* be mistaken in approaching it from the technical end of things.

As already mentioned, design is fast becoming very technical. There are still plenty of old school designers out there, but a new breed from more technical backgrounds are rapidly pushing their way through. Go on a pure design course and you’ll likely not be employable in the web industry by the time you finish it.

But, in my experience, the technical stuff is self taught. The qualifications will be favoured for your proof of competence in life in general (all the developers I’ve worked with have had qualifications in something completely unrelated). The rest you learn by getting stuck in. It’s easy to make it all the way through a college/uni course and still not really have a clue. If you want to learn, get stuck into some projects and pick up some good books to help you along the way. If books are too dry, there’s some good stuff online, including youtube, depending on what you’re learning.

There’s plenty on youtube etc etc.

After that, if you want a ‘qualification’ of some kind look at proper training courses. Stump up a few hundred quid and spend a week doing the course. You’ll learn next to nothing new, but you’ll know what level you’re at and you’ll have something for your CV (you’ll also cover more in a week than you will in a year at college).