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Photo above is of the nature trail behind Henry Ford Community College. Currently, the trail is 1.8 miles and extends from Hines Drive, east through the HFCC campus, the University of Michigan Dearborn to Michigan Avenue. Once a walker, roller blader, runner, or cyclist reaches Hines Drive, paths on both sieds of the Drive can be taken nearly traffic light free for 17 miles west from the from the Rouge River behind the college to Northville, MI. Along Hines Drive are numerous baseball and soccer fields, fishing docks and picnic areas. The development of this trail is a part of numerous Rouge River restoration projects including water quality, ecosystem heath monitoring, and animal, plant, and erosion restoration. Eventually, the trail is to extend all the way east to downtown Detroit. Photo taken in the Winter of 2008.
Web Careers: Job Titles and Skills Posted: January 15, 2008
The field of web development includes an enormously large numbers of skills. No one person has all these skills and no one is expected to. Perhaps the greatest skills are the ability to adapt, learn to new software and techniques, persist, troubleshoot, and problem solve. While there are those exceptional few who are jack-of-all-trades, the typical web professional will have several core skills that they are very proficient at and numerous secondary skills they have some familiarity with. The skill set a web professional should have is based on what type of job and job responsibilities they have.
Table 1: Job Titles and Skills
| Job Type | Skills |
|---|---|
| Web development/programmer | HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, DHTML, .NET (ASP, VB), C#, Java, J2EE, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, AJAX, SQL, XML, XSL, ColdFusion, Python, Web 2.0. |
| Web/graphic designer | Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator and InDesign, CSS, HTML, Dreamweaver, Flash, ActionScript, typography, color theory, layout skills, web accessibility and standards. |
| Multimedia developer | Flash, ActionScript, Fireworks, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, 3D Studio Max, Maya. |
| Systems analyst / Project manager | Gather project requirements from client, manage process, timelines, budgets, provide leadership and mentorship to team members, oversee release of web site, quality assurance, and maintenance. |
The best way to gauge what skills are needed for a corporate web position is the view job postings. Dice.com is one of the best web sites to do this. Search for job titles such as web developer, web programmer, or even ASP.
Web/Graphic Designer vs. Web Developer.
A common question asked by those first learning about the field is: "what is the difference between a web designer, graphic designer, and web developer?" A web designer, as the name implies "designs"a web site. This person typically is strong in visual and graphical skills with a creative and artistic background. Good graphic design and photo editing skills are typically the foundation to web design. A web designer is responsible for the overall look-and-feel of a web site, the choice of colors, graphics, font type, and layout of the web site.
A web developer typically has a stronger background in programming and, thus, is usually the one responsible for developing (building) dynamic web sites that interact with a database or other data source such as XML. In terms of college certificates and degrees, the curriculum out of an Art, Media, or Visual Communication department is likely the best preparation for a career in web design, whereas a career in Web Development is likely best found in a Computer Information Systems or Computer Science department. And, as illustrated in Figure 1 below, severals skills should be present in both a web designer and web devleoper.
Figure 1: Venn Diagram of Web Developer and Web Designer Skills
Do I need to know HTML?
Another commonly asked question in terms of skills is "Do I need to know HTML?" The reason this is typically asked is that graphical web authoring software such as Dreamweaver automatically generate the HTML for you when you are creating the web site. Nevertheless, the answer to this question is still "Yes", you should know HTML. Why? Below are the reasons.
- WYSIWYG is sometimes WYSIAWYG. WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get" and refers to the fact that graphical editors, such as web authoring software, allow you to see what your web page will look like as you are editing and designing it. In contrast, when you hand code HTML, you cannot see what you web page will look like until you save it and view it in the web browser. WYSIWYG is almost synonymous with graphical or GUI (Graphical User Interface). However, occasionally with graphical web authoring software, what you see is only "almost" what you get, e.g. WYSIAWYG – "What You See Is Almost What You Get." In such cases, it may be necessary to "tweak" (edit) the page using pure HTML. This is way most web authoring software, such as Dreamweaver, have a Design View (WYSIWYG), a Code view (HTML), or Split view (where you can see both the web page as you edit it and the code).
- It’s expected. Most employers hiring web designer and web developers expect proficiency in HTML.
- Create quick and simple web pages. Without a graphical web authoring software, using just any text editor, a simple web page can be easily and quickly created in HTML. The need for this does come up, sometimes to make a quick update or correction. Think of knowing HTML as being able to edit anytime, anywhere.
- Tableless CSS-based sites. There is a new trend in web design and development, which is to create tableless CSS-based web sites. Historically, tables have been used to layout the contents of a web page. For example, a table is typically used in web page layout to separate the top heading content from the left navigation menu content from the body text content. CSS and DIV tags are an alternative way to layout a web page and often hand-coded. Once done, this code is very easy to read and maintain. Such sites are also often very aesthetically pleasing with a particularly artist style.
- Web programming. Web developers who create dynamic web sites with web programming/scripting languages such ASP, PHP, or Perl must know HTML. The dynamic web sites that web programmers create generate the web page by interweaving many languages, including HTML, ASP, and SQL (for more information see Chapter 6 which surveys these languages).
- It’s easy. HTML is not a programming language. It is a relatively simple set of codes, called tags, which are used to tell the web browser how to display content on a web page, i.e. font types and sizes, colors, formatting (bold, italics), line spacing, justification (left, center), etc. Simple HTML is also used to create a hyperlink or insert an image. Complex tables used to organize data/information are one of the few cases when graphical authoring software is probably necessary.
What is a Webmaster?
Webmaster is an elusive job title that has both evolved and been described in several different ways. Like many job types, some of the variance in this position’s job responsibilities sometimes lies in whether one works in a large organization or a small organization. In large organizations, there are typically more IT employees and jobs can become more specialized than in a small organization where someone may be required to wear more than one hat (i.e. perform more than one job type). Another reason for why webmaster job responsibilities sometimes vary is just that fact that different companies define it differently.
The fact is there is no perfect definition of a webmaster. Many companies include the responsibilities of a web designer and web developer within those the scope of a webmaster. The following, however, are possible responsibilities a webmaster that do not typically fall within the scope of a web designer or developer. Note: that all webmasters perform all of these activities.
- Respond to incoming e-mails to info@site.com, webmaster@site.com, feedback@site.com, or whatever catch-all e-mail address is being used.
- Check for broken links and orphan pages (i.e. pages with links to them)
- Monitor the error logs and report potential problems
- Monitor and tune web site performance and web server software (may include load balancing)
- Monitor web site traffic (and produce reports) for marketing purposes (i.e. most visited pages, least visited pages, length of stay on web site, etc.)
- Backup web site
- Maintain mirror of web site
- Manage web site search engine submissions and ranking
- Configure connectivity between the web pages and a database back-end
- Install server software necessary for web sites needs, such as content management software, Perl and other compiler/interpreter packages, etc.
- Maintain an organized file system on web server
- Monitor and maintain web site security