How many people know web design? Do they get paid well, have benefits, and can they find jobs easily?
Also to make advanced sites like google, ebay, amazon, etc do they need to be good programmers and know far more than HTML?

Anyway enjoy the link

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"The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery." George Bernard Shaw (Hence christian sects)"Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones"
"Matthew 7 21. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven;... depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
Orthodoxy=best kept secret in the US. 2nd largest Christian communion in the world

A cuple things to think about though is that web design is a very time consuming process. Besides that it is verry demanding. Everyone has seen the huge sites like Goolge and Amazon so they have high expectations. What they don't know is that sites like Google and Amazon have dedicated full time web teams that get paid quite well, making each of those sites a masive investment. They expect a site that is much more like those monsters. so when they get what you made for them they often times feel ripped off. Even though truthfully your the one getting ripped off because you probably didn't get paid all your work was worth, and you now have an unhappy customer.

Another aspect of web design is that its a medium that is acessable to the whole world. So you are expected to make it work for the whole world, each browser IE, Firefox, Safari and so on handle the code a little differently. Also older versions of browsers support even less fetures and code. Lastly every platform (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) also add more veriety into the mix. That means that to make sure your site works corectly you must test it on all browsers and platforms. Then as a problem arises you must figure out how to fix it withought messing something else up for one of the other browsers or platforms.

Lastly web design is sort of like creating a TV show that is always on. So if anything goes wrong on the server and creates downtime or messes up a part of your site you must work like a slave to get it all back up and running as soon as posible. Just think of the demands that something that has to be up and running corectly, simoltaniously to multipul users, and on 24/67 are.

As far as making sites like the big boys. Oh yah they require tons more than HTML. No site is made up of purly HTML these days and big sites work off of backends and are more like a huge pice of software than your concpet of a web site. For example a medium/small dynamic site that my partner and I would create would include: CSS, XHML, PHP, JavaScript, .Net, XML, MySQL aumong other things. And don't forget that a talented artist needs to come up with the graphical look which must then be implemented through the CSS. Jeff

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1. Your employer, friend, whoever, has a very good idea of what he wants out of his site, or is willing to sit down and hash out the look, feel, etc., of it with you before development takes place.

-or-

2. Your employer, friend, whoever, has a fairly implicit trust in your skills and will let you use your best judgment (and you know enough of his intentions to make something suitable).

My failed website was, at least, an interesting exercise for me to develop my php skills, as well as to pick up Miva Merchant's language, MivaScript, that it uses for its e-commerce stuff.

CSS is fabulous. It's so fun being able to change the entire look & feel of a site from one centralized location. I'm learning slowly about the importance of "best practice" in web development - Making websites so that whoever follows after you and has to support your code isn't tempted to find you and strangle you. I'm dealing with this issue with a website that I'm updating for a friend's client - some other company did their site in 2003, and it's the most awful conglomeration of table layouts. It has a CSS file, but they only use it for a few elements; the rest are all done with tables and whatnot.

Speaking of which, check out our blog for Ghana (I don't know if Clint already posted about this) - http://herron.elkhartrpc.org!

The blog works pretty well; I would like it to work better, but hey, I coded it in php myself, what can you expect?

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it's pronounced "tonics"

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My real name is William, feel free to call me that.
I can't spell feel free to corret me.

are you guys in Ghana yet?

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WARNING:

RADIOACTIVE IE AHEAD!
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#include <spazz.h>

int name()
{
char name['B','u','d','d','B','o''y']

God Bless!
-Trevor