Hand Built Web Pages

The world has changed since the birth of web page building. Back in the good old days (Web Beta anyone?) we used to make them by hand - typing the code into Notepad and, where possible, copying and pasting somebody else’s into your own work. For making images we used Paint Shop Pro.

As most people had a dial up connection, every line of code was scrutinised and reduced so that pages loaded quickly.

Simple web sites were all we knew and animated gif’s were considered a luxury. I still have a classic old page on my site.

Then along came big business and advertisers with their new browsers, WYSIWYG software such as Front Page and Dreamweaver and with them Microsoft's asp (Active Server Pages) and, as I wasn’t born with the maths part of the brain functioning, I drifted into site design and customer relations (i.e. management).

I’m currently casting my eye around the job sites and although web authoring isn’t currently my first choice of occupation I can do it, and do it well. But nowadays the job spec is crazy. This is what you are expected to know if you want to earn £25,000 per annum.

ASP; ASP.net; HTML; XML; XHTML; XSLT; JavaScript; CSS; RedDot; ADO; OLEDB; COM objects; SQL Server/Query Analyser; Dreamweaver; Contribute; Photoshop; MS Office; Flash.

I can do about seven of those skills but that isn’t enough as they also want…

Exposure to methodologies, processes and controls including at least some of: Rapid Application Development; Object Orientation; web integration; firewall technologies; MS Project

As I said above… In the good old days we used to make web pages by hand…