Hello Forum!

Hi, I am suse and I work self-employed as web designer.

I came to this job in a bit a funny way: Due to a man, I ended up quite in the country side. I will have a masters degree (hopefully very soon) in media but it looks really bad in getting anything nice around here.

This is the reason why my partner took me on in their 2-people team to give me a job. They did web sites and whatever came along. Well, as it happened, I ended up on my own more or less.

I am trying my best to learn, I am sitting down with books and it is going well so far. I successfully installed a samba file sharing server and a wiki (I wrote my thesis about Wikis and corporate culture, so I was personally interested in seeing how it works in practice!) for a rather big company here in NI, it worked straight away and never crashed .

For the future though, I thought I should try and get some "proper" qualifications and do some classes/online courses!
What would you guys advise me to do? There is so much on offer, some are simply way over my budget, but I want something recognised. My focus would be on web development, I like web design a lot but I think my strength is more coding than design work.

So I will be trying to help out here wherever I can and I'll be looking for advice and tipps myself, for CSS, html, Joomla, Linux, ocassionally PHP and MySql etc...

I am looking forward to hearing from you, any suggestions are welcome!
Have a nice weekend everybody!
suse

...sorry, that was a long one

[delusion]

people say www.lynda.com is a good one to study..

Welcom btw

[VanessaJW]

Hi Suse, welcome, don't apologise for the long post, it's nice when people introduce themselves properly and tell us a bit about themselves - gives us something to talk about with you rather than just saying 'welcome!'

When you say you want a properly recognised qualification - what is your purpose for wanting that? The reason I ask is because this subject comes up quite often in the forum and opinions are divided on whether qualifications are necessary or not in this field. Obviously some jobs you apply for may require a particular qualification, but whenever you're selling yourself as a web designer/developer, showing a portfolio of work you have done is worth much more than a qualification (as long as the work is good of course!). Having said that, it is personal choice of course; I actually did a really good course with the Open University myself which gave me a really good start with everything.

Anyway, welcome! Do stick around, whether you do a course or not, you'll find Webforumz an invaluable companion to your development!

Hello Vanessa,
thanks for that friendly welcome!

Regarding the courses, I guess that is maybe a bit a German attitude (we love certificates ;-) ) and I do think I have so much more to learn, especially if I want to be able to have the option to find also employed work at some point.
My boyfriend keeps telling me that this is nonsense, that a portfolio and learning by doing is indeed the best way to make headway.
Well, I will see, but it is interesting to hear what courses are maybe recommended.

So, thanks a lot!

@delusion: thanks for the tipp, these courses seem really good indeed. As far as I understood they are without any certificate though.

Susanne

[mcdanielnc89]

Hello and welcome to WebForumz! We hope you have a great time here and feel free to ask any questions that you have.

God Bless,
-Nathaniel

[alexgeek]

Welcome to the forums Suse.
Good luck friend!

[JacobHaug]

Welcome!

[D3niss3]

Hi and welcome to WebForums suse!

[sannbe]

Hi ya, Suse. Either way, Certification or experience, are good ways to go. What really matters is how you learn. I am earning a living in an area other than web design at the moment, but it works the same. My personal experience is I am hired because of my knowledge and skills. And most businesses, will hire for what you know not how you learned it. The choice is yours.

[Daniel]

Welcome to the forumz.

[Ross]

Welcome to WebForumz

[Marc]

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

[Spyros]

Welcome!