Web Design in Scotland Sucks | Part One

Time for a sweeping statement to grab your attention, web design in Scotland sucks.

You might think I’m coming across as a pompus young upstart but as someone who has came through the educational system gaining a BSC Hons degree in Multimedia Technology I think that I’m pretty well placed to broadcast this viewpoint. I’m going to split this topic over two articles, so that you’re not having to read one mammoth report on my thoughts and how I think we should go about fixing it.

A bit of background on me

I left school without really knowing what I wanted to do. I’d pinned all my hopes on doing something science related as this was the route that my school encouraged everyone to go down but my heart was never really in it and in the end I ended up failing miserably.

I actually owe a huge amount of gratitude to a family friend who set me down the path of becoming a web designer. She worked in my local college and told me of a new course that had just opened up with interviews being held later on in the week for the last remaining places. Seeing as I didn’t have anything else lined up and had a passing interest in computers I went along, not expecting much. A few days later I found out I had made the cut, even without any knowledge of computer based subjects, make of that what you will.

College & University

My opinion of College is actually better than that of University and below I’ll give a brief insight into both:

College

My College experience was great, it covered everything you could want in a beginner course. The fact that the course was brand new definitely had something to do with this, they had obviously had the benefit of reviewing other institutions and realising what worked and what didn’t. Another thing the department had going for them, which I’ll touch on later, was the fact that every single member of staff had been sourced from a web background and knew exactly what they were talking about.

I owe alot to one lecturer in particular, who took me through building my first “Hello World” website to my first full-blown site, with calls to the database and a good site hierarchy. I’ve yet to meet another person who shares that same passion for their work.

University

This is where the introduction of web standards, across the board, would pay dividends. I had spent the last two years learning the fundamentals on how to construct a website but it turned out that the vast majority of my new University classmates had not, so we all had to enter into the mandatory one month refresher course.

The refresher course actually turned out to be terrible, the lecturer who was handed the task of getting everyone up to speed didn’t really seem to even grasps the most basic of html tags. How did I know this I hear you ask, well one of his many mistakes was in telling people that it was still ok to create websites with tables, if you so wished.

Once the refresher course was out of the way we finally got let loose on our project, to create a web site for an imaginary local music band. When I got my mark back I couldn’t believe it, I was being marked down for the most bizarre things. Two things I remember vividly from my feedback were;

Of course, we all know now that the last one is poppycock.

Another thing that really irritated me during that module was the fact that I was being marked down, incorrectly, whereas other students who were creating their projects in tables without any form of penalisation.

If the truth be told, I only stayed at University for that bit of paper as the rest of the subjects simply didn’t interest me. I often wonder whether employers actually care if you have an academic qualification when it comes down to getting a job in web design but that’s for another conversation entirely.

How would I improve the courses

Lecturers

As it turned out the lecturer, mentioned above, would take two of my other classes that year, which is far too much work for anyone to take on. How can a lecturer be expected to continue their learning in a fast moving industry such as web design and the two other projects he was having to take whilst also teaching his students coupled with all of the marking of projects and examination papers that being a lecturer entails.

It is also probably fair to assume that the lecturer is just like everyone else and will have a better understanding in some subject areas than he will in others. In this case web design was obviously his least favourite subject and therefore didn’t spend as much time reading into it as he did with his other subjects.

So how would I reform this area? Well, for a start I think that we need to get rid of the idea that people teaching tech subjects, specifically web design, need to hold a masters degree because in reality a lot of web professionals are self-taught or their studies are from completely unrelated backgrounds. I’m going out on a limb here but do people like Jeffrey Zeldman, Andy Clarke or Dan Cederholm have degrees in web design, I doubt it.

I highlighted above that my College lecturers were great because they were sourced from working environments and because of this they were more up-to-date on newer techniques and discussions. They also shared the same passion as the students, which was vital.

Call in the big guns

I can’t comment on all parts of the United Kingdom but I know that up here in Scotland when it comes to web events we have close to zero. Which is why I believe that Universities, certainly the bigger ones that can afford it, should use some of their department budget to pull in a guest speaker occasionally.

Excuse the lame analogy but hearing a guest speaker, who is high up in their field, coming to speak to a bunch of young progessionals would be akin to your footballing hero speaking to you when you were younger. These big guns have the ability to come in and stir emotion in anyone. They will be able to tell their audience of their past experiences and what they done when they were just starting out.

Work placements

Some Universities are great for offering work placements within their degree courses, sending out students during the summer months to learn more about the subject area but I believe that this is an area which should be mandatory for all University students.

University cannot offer you the real world experience that working within an agency will give you. These internships would be able to offer you the chance to put your textbook learning into practice. Another plus about being able to work in a company, is that you will be surrounded by lots of people who are passionate about their work and this is something that you certainly won’t get in University.

In Summary

This article has focused solely on my experiences in the education sector of web design and some of the areas I think we should look at reforming. It is probably only fair to point out that my experiences will not be a good reference point for Scotland as a whole but I do believe that there are probably more bad institutions than good ones.

I know some of the people who read and comment on here have/are attending University, so I’m looking for your input on this subject too. Was I way off the mark, have you encountered similar problems, what do you think we, as recent, graduates should do?

Next up I’m tackling Scottish web professionals and conferences.