Starting up on a career in web design/development

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13 Jan 2007
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Belfast,Northern Ireland
Was previously warned off this by friends with more wisdom when I was 17, they basically told me its difficult to get a decent wage in this field. I listened to this advice despite feeling like I have a bit of flair for web development and definitely enjoy it.

I think uni is just trying to carve me into a software dev monkey, which judging from the internships i've done, I would not enjoy as a fulltime career.

So if I am looking towards preparing myself for a career in web development, how should I prepare myself, considering im going into final year of a comp science degree.

Right now i've got some photoshop tutorials downloaded, as I have never really used it much. Also going to start learning php/mysql as it seems to be recommended here a lot. Essentially am I best making projects and therefore websites that I can use as a 'porfolio' as such? Im going to a summer internship position where it seems they want you to make a website, they mention coding it so it hits well on search engines, is this quite advanced?

Also by which stage should I consider myself ready to take small freelance jobs?

Finally im sure we have some professional web designers/devs on board, would they recommend it as a career?
 
Can I ask the range of programming languages you find yourself using in daily life? Or I assume its mainly whatever is the best option for the project at hand?

Without prying to much would you consider your wage competitive to say a software developer working in the finance sector? Ignore of course if thats getting a bit personal
 
And thats the reason i quit a computer science degree after year 1 :p

The money might be good, but the work is soul destroyingly, catastrophically dull.

This is my biggest fear going into IT. I am not exactly the typical computer science student. I love to travel, I do a ridiculous amount of training/sport, I seem to socialise a great deal more than people I have met in IT. I have done a few internships and frankly found them dull, I had bugger all work to do and the people were hard to relate to. As i said im more social than the average but building a rapport took a lot of effort and didnt seem to come much from their side. (obviously this doesnt apply to everybody in IT)

I think I could easily have success in any field I go into in IT. But I want to ENJOY my career, not be massively wealthy, though obviously both would be ideal. At the moment im looking into hybrid business/IT roles like business analyst, project management and even teaching ICT.

May I ask what you do now, how you came to do it?
 
Hey Shicky, you should be able to relate to this.

Guess what my final year uni project was... Remember UKCSL?

Haha I remember you telling me that actually! Remember you seemed to be getting buggered for time with the freelance job on top. Not a position i would be overly keen to get myself into.

Can I ask what your full time role is? Or is it technically as a web developer, you just have a lot more responsibility ( as you mentioned networking etc )

The thing that made me do a U-Turn on the web development was in my last internship in a networking dept. I had contact with their web dev who was a girl in her 20s who they seemed to think was amazing....I saw her work and wasnt overly impressed. She was getting 25k a year and was soon to leave because she had been given a better offer elsewhere. From chatting to yourself and others, I didn't really think this was a sustainable career a few years ago and you would only survive if you were the best of the best as such. I say this as any average joe can develop his/her website, large companies will go to large IT companies, so it only leaves small-medium business as potential clients, with a huge amount of developers going for the contracts.

Thank you for all your advice in the thread, you seem to say things I had previously had in my head for the correct way to go about things. Hope you're well mate!
 
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