Web Design to reach new lows

February 9, 2000 8:58 AM

Web Design to reach new lows as the college programs unleash their first wave of cookie-cutter web designers and Microsoft fights to give us a new appreciation for the untalented. Ugh.
posted by othermatt (5 comments total)

The IT staff at my company sent out a memo a few weeks ago stating that all Web design would be supported only via Front Page, because it was included with Windoze 2K.

Never mind that no one in the shop had experience with Front Page. At some point rational thought prevailed and IT was told to leave the Web staff alone and go back to screwing up^W^Wmaintaining the Exchange servers.

I suck at Web design, and I didn't even need a four year program to figure that out. :-)
posted by antc at 9:17 AM on February 9, 2000

There's been talk before about how web design is free of accreditation and certification, and any certification test you could devise would be skewed towards your particular expertise or point of view, but I bet we see a push this year towards getting some sort of certification test set up.

Luckily, there's no "center" or governing body that people would trust, so if the HTML Writers Guild or Microsoft devises a test, no one is going to take it seriously.
posted by mathowie at 10:09 AM on February 9, 2000

Oh, I firmly disagree. While no one in the industry would take it seriously, potential employers are always anxious to hear about another piece of paper on your wall, regardless of its source.
posted by othermatt at 2:01 PM on February 9, 2000

*Some* potential employers! As a potential employer (and employer, actually) of web people myself, I couldn't give a hooey about any pieces of paper (regardless of source), and a certificate of this sort would probably be a strike *against* the candidate because of what it says about them.

Then again, I'm a college dropout (and proud of it), so maybe I'm not the norm, unfortunately, but there are quite a few people out there (hopefully, in the places you'd want to work), that are rational about such things.

Speaking of, I was chatting to a VC today (in Silicon Valley, no less), who acted like it actually *mattered* that I wasn't "classicly" trained (I think he actually used that term) in computer science, even though...well, I'm ranting, so I'll stop there.

posted by evhead at 9:50 PM on February 9, 2000

evhead wrote ::
"so maybe I'm not the norm"

oh no, you're not , ) and be proud of it !
how many webdesigners employers read metafilter, or even know it exist ?

in france, i've seen a spec for a job... 10/15 years of experience in an internet related job needed.
posted by deboute at 4:46 AM on February 14, 2000