Matts Blog

While I am developing my skills as a website developer/designer I have decided to make a couple of lists of what I have achieved, aim to achieve and have touched upon. Here you will find those lists! That is if you wish to peruse them.

Adept At:

• HTML (4 and 5)
• XHTML Syntax
• CSS (2/2.1/3)
• Graceful Degradation

These are the most basic aspects of a website, furthermore I try to go to lengths to ensure I follow best-practices and keep things as simple as possible – for example Graceful Degradation, keeping a website readable no matter if styles are disabled or the browser out-dated.

Touched Upon:

• PHP (server-side coding language, quite common)
• ASP (active server pages, becoming a rare technology)
• MySQL/SQL (database language)

I would like to note that I have a fair bit of experience with these, particularly PHP and MySQL. I am still not confident with my abilities in them though, but plan to keep working on them over time. Provided a detailed specification (or chance to develop a detailed specification) I could likely make a functional application – but it should not be time-critical.

Aim to Do:

• JavaScript
• jQuery
• XML
• AJAX

So there is handful of lists, as I find more technologies that interest me I’ll likely add them to the latter list – but for now that is quite a substantial selection. I have a very good general knowledge of what each one is, its a case of learning the language/syntax and best practices which start to take time. This alongside my aim to develop my skills in design, which is a much larger task overall – such as colour theory, colour-themes and putting it all into practice for a functional and well-designed website.