Career as Web Developer

[Andy86]

Hi all

I am 21 years old and am nearing completion of my multimedia and web design course at a university in England and wondered if anyone could give me any tips on the next step to take to becoming a web developer.

Where is the best place to start is really what I want to know?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thank you :)

[ray326]

Create a portfolio and get some clients. Your own web site can host/be your portfolio.

[Andy86]

Thanks. I'll make sure I get started on that soon!

Are there any good websites or anything in England where I can job hunt?

Is it a good community to enter? I know everything can be boring from time to time but I want to be doing something that I'd enjoy!

At the moment I feel I know very little about anything because university has given me a taster of things but hasn't gone into great detail.

[ray326]

This is quite an international site so you should get some good feedback but commercial web site development isn't my bailiwick. I'm a web app developer for a piece of the military-industrial-complex in the US.

In general it is a good community. Check out Zeldman and friends. Of course these folks are the rock stars of the domain.

[Andy86]

Ah well that's good :) .

I hope I get some feedback off a few others too.

Another thing I'm still not sure about is whether to train myself up in php or asp.NET. From university, I only really know asp.NET. We've never really been taught php which I find odd for a website course to be honest seeming as we were even made to suffer Coldfusion. I've always been interested in learning a bit of php though.

[ray326]

I'd definitely recommend you learn PHP with database access. You'll run into a lot more PHP/MySQL on the Internet than ASP.NET/SQ Server although neither technology is tied to a particular database server. I primarily work with Java/Struts/JSP and JDBC or container managed connection pooling to DB2 and Oracle.

[Jeff Mott]

You'll run into a lot more PHP/MySQL on the Internet than ASP.NET/SQ ServerI'm not so sure about that.

Monster and CareerBuilder are two of the best and largest job-finding services. A search for PHP on CareerBuilder returned 55 pages of results; ASP.NET, 97 pages. And on Monster, PHP returned about 2,500 results, while ASP.NET returned about 4,500.

PHP may be more popular among open-source developers, but in the job market, ASP.NET is more in demand.

[ryanbutler]

Getting a degree related to the web wouldn't hurt. Internships, paid or not, are always a good option. I remember times not so long ago that I worked on sites for very small fees just to show prospective employers that I was willing to do grunt work to get on somewhere and then hopefully advance.

Looking back on it I wouldn't change a thing. A lot of confusion I see in students in my undergraduate program is they think that college can teach you everything about what you'll face in the industry. That will not happen. I can think of several meetings at my employer in the past few months where I've had a long brain storm session with developers and system administrator's that are smarter and better than me trying to figure out a way to make something work with our network. Bottom line in these meetings is bring people to the table who specialize in different areas to make sure we don't step on other people's toes.

I think the main thing to realize is that most employers who have had people in IT for a number of years understand and realize that colleges don't teach students everything, but they look for people who are willing to take on a project and figure it out. I've done this numerous times for my employer and it earns you a lot of respect among other developers and managers.

As far as skills, most web developers in my area need the ability to switch between languages, unless you take a job that specifically states you'll be using C# and ASP.NET. There's quite a few jobs that advertise a combination of languages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, ASP.NET, XML, etc. There's obviously no disadvantage in specializing in one, I just don't see it much around my area.

Good luck.