A new issue of Reflections of …

A new issue of Reflections
of a Modem Junkie
is out.

A friend of mine in the new media industry who is in a hiring
position asked me “Where have all the good web designers gone?” I
completely forgot about my old rant from a while back entitled “The
Problem With the Web Design Industry
” which sums up some of my old
feelings about trying to recruit web designers who know what they’re
doing. The industry is to a point where there are so many jobs
available and so few qualified candidates that even web designers with
only a little bit of knowledge and experience are pulling in a decent
salary – certainly above the
entry-level figures they should be
making.

Another growing problem is that we’re starting to see the first
wave of college graduates who have been formally [classroom] trained in
new media
come out of our colleges. Many of these graduates lack the real-world
experience needed to solve the problems that are thrown at web
designers and developers on a daily basis. I know of many hiring
managers who plow through hundreds of resumes for web designers, only
to find below-average work and designers who don’t fully understand
the technology behind the work they’re doing. Instead, we’re seeing
web designers who rely far too much on Dreamweaver or Flash and don’t
make any attempts to learn or understand the basic building blocks of
a web site. Without those fundamental skills and a good
understanding of how a web site is assembled from start to finish, I’m
afraid we’re going to start seeing even more Flash-only e-commerce
sites (yikes!) or sites that don’t follow the standards in functional
usability and pervasive acessibility.

Yesterday’s Good
Experience
entry refers to boo.com, an e-commerce
site that uses new media technology improperly. Astute readers will
notice the implied correlation between this entry and the one above
about web designers and developers who don’t understand that building web
sites is about more than showcasing new technologies or creating some
pretty GIFs.

From the Archives: Why
Designers Should Care About Mozilla

Fizilla is Mozilla
for MacOS X. [Interesting…]

John Dvorak talks about a hidden
agenda
in the Cross Site Scripting Security
announcement Microsoft released last week.

A reader sent in this link
to an article
about a species of mammal that
shares a 98% genetic profile with humans. Get this: the species is
female-centered and substitutes sex for aggression. This directly
challenges the assumptions we have about male supremacy in human
evolution. [Fascinating!]

Posted by Cameron Barrett at February 8, 2000 07:47 PM

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