Typical daily life of a web developer

Arrive at the office early, around 8am. Make a cup of tea or coffee and feed the fish. Turn on my monitor. I leave my PC running. The statistic for how much of my life is spent waiting for Windows to boot, is just as scary as the famous statistic of the percentage of our life spent asleep. At least I can influence the former more easily. I check through my emails binning any spam. Look to see if any of the sites we maintain have mailed system errors, or if any users have filed bug reports. We always fix bugs as a priority over creating new code. With new code you have a specification to work to, and therefore, have a good idea of how long it's going to take. A project manager's dream. Bugs are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. Therefore, it could take five minutes, or all day, to track down the offending code and fix it. A project manager's nightmare.

Switch to Firefox web-browser and check my personal web-mail and any new posts in the technical forums that I am registered with. Make another hot beverage. Hmm... hot chocolate today I think. Finally, fire up the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of choice. In my case this is either Visual Studio 2003 or Visual Studio 2005. Time to start squashing bugs. How this goes generally sets the mood for the rest of the day. When the bugs are not hiding the feel good factor is high. You feel your day is going to be productive with lots of time hacking new code and designing flashy layouts. When the bugs have gone to ground and the day starts to run out of hours, it does not feel quite so productive. There is the brief satisfaction of having hunted down and squashed a nasty. But, you can't sit back and admire a fixed bug like you can a new three column layout with animated links.

On a good day, bug squashing is over before lunch time. This leaves a little time to surf the Internet. There is some really strange content on the information super-highway. Other content of interest are technical articles written by my peers on the latest up and coming technologies, or new versions of existing frameworks and tools. Now it's the lunch hour. Someone takes orders around the office and scoots off to Starbucks or Nero's to get some proper coffee.

The afternoon hopefully involves the best part of the job. Now I get to exercise my creative talents. This is the part I like the best and the reason I am a web-developer. This is when it doesn't feel like a job and I'm happy as a sand-boy. It's 5:30pm before I know it, time to check my work into source control. depending on how I'm feeling mentally and whether other commitments permit I may leave now or push through to 6 or 7. Occasionally, when a project has slipped particularly badly we may go to stupid o'clock. Mondays are usually an early finish to get to the squash courts.

Web Developer Vrs Web Designers

Web Developers and Web Designers are two very different animals altogether. Web Designers draw pictures all day then go home to enjoy their evenings with friends and family, go to the cinema, sports clubs, pubs, or watch a movie at home with their nearest and dearest whilst tucking in to a fantastic take-away. Web Developers (or Programmers as they were called in the good old days) on the other hand write code all day, then go home and write more code until they collapse on the keyboard. Night after night after night. Don't get me wrong, one is no more important than the other when it comes to producing your website, it's just that one puts in ten times more effort than the other!


So what's the difference? Well for a start, Web Developers are rubbish at designing websites, and Web Designers are rubbish at making websites actually work. Developers have no artistic creativity at all, and absolutely no idea which color goes with what. Pan tones what? CMYK what? Forget it. Developers can't even match their handbags to their shoes. They can cut graphics up which they've been given and optimize them for the web but that's as far as it goes. Secondly, Web Developers can't incorporate your beautiful web design into any kind of printed literature. The Designers are the ones who look after your corporate identity right across the breadth of your marketing activities, and they talk to printers in language they can understand. Developers can't do that (and don't want to do that).


So it pains me to say it, but Developers need Designers to keep feeding them beautiful designs because they are simply not genetically equipped to do it themselves.

However, these pictures of websites they produce, these designs, will remain pictures until the Web Developer gets their hands on it and brings it to life on the internet. Yes, it's the developer who actually makes it work. And it's the Developer who spends ten times longer getting it to work than the Designer did drawing it!

Unless the Designer is very familiar with web work, the Developer can be presented with impossible tasks. Designing for print is a far cry from designing for the web because the web design is something that is functional, it has navigation requirements, sometimes complex ones, and the design has to take this into account. In fact website navigation is a key aspect of the design, and if it's not right the Developer will pass it back to the Designer who then has to go back to the client.
The Designer also needs a good understanding of what is technically possible so they can design their widgets with confidence. And if you're VERY lucky, you'll come across a designer who also has an understanding of what works well for the search engines. So I'll admit, designers do need SOME technical understanding, much like they need some technical understanding of the print process.

But let's not get carried away here, Web Designers still draw pictures all day and Web Developers still write code all day and all night.So, the Designer is the one who is responsible for putting your corporate image across on the internet and giving your website that 'wow factor'; the one thing that will create a good first impression (because as we all know, you only get one chance to create a good first impression). But the poor Developer is the one in the back room cutting the design up and coding it up so that it works not only efficiently, but just as the Designer (and the customer) had envisaged.

Technical phones by Blackberry brought to you by RIM

Business phones are special phones that all business professionals require. The Blackberries brought by RIM are considered as the most liked business phones throughout the world. But the blackberry are so simple that even a general user can try his or her hands on it.

The latest handset that is introduced to the blackberry family is the all new Blackberry Storm 9500. This smart phonehas a beautiful touch screen. It has a 3.25 inch TFT capacitive touch cum display screen. This wonderful screen can very well support 65 K colours which together brings out a wonderful resolution of 360 x 480 pixels. The gadget is fitted with an Accelerometer sensor which helps in auto-rotate feature of the phone.



This 3G handset is different from rest of its brothers. It is quite compact in size and can very easily fit in your pocket or the handbag. It weighs only a hundred and fifty grams and its dimension measure 112.5 x 62.2 x 14 mm. Available in black colour this phone has a casing around it which gives it the most stunning look. This phone is gifted with a 2 fantastic keyboards. 1st is the Sure Type of keypad and as soon as you rotate the handset a full QWERTY keyboard appears and makes typing hell easy. With the help of this wonderful keyboard you can easily type e mails, text messages or SMS and all the other kind of typings are facilitated by these keys.

Blackberry Storm 9500 Deals brings you this beautiful handset which has an amazing 3.15 mega pixel camera. This camera also has a LED Flash. With the help of this flash you can very easily click pictures even in the darkest corner of the room. And using the auto focus the need to focus the object manually is totally shunned. The image stabilization and Geo Tagging make the experience even more fun filled. The camera is fully capable of video recording. But it video records in QVGA quality. Using this camera you can capture most precious moments of your life.

You can get Blackberry Storm 9500 Deals on any network of your choice. You can make a selection from Vodafone, T Mobile, O2, Virgin, Three MobileArticle Search, Orange or any other that you like. So there is no reason left why this beautiful phone should not be opted for.

Joomla Website Builder

Joomla is a very powerful web site design software tool. This program is an open source code, so there is no charge for acquiring and using the software. Now that, you must admit, is a tremendous deal. You will surely agree after you take some time and review Joomla.

It is almost unbelievable, if not ludicrous and irrational, that the developers of this software freely give it away. But, that is the impetus behind open source code- to share with the public. Truely a design to help empower those that do not have the financial wherewithal to acquire high end software and compete with large corporations.

Noting that Joomla is openly downloadable for public use or what is commonly referred to as shareware makes its professional design even more incredible. Creating a high quality software program is a major challenge for any corporate team of developers. Because Joomla was developed by a group of web designers and programmers outside of that corporate shadow, the group responsible for Joomla's development had few limitations on creativity. The melding of minds in the group resulted in a very powerful software program that is used by individuals and companies alike.

Review the Joomla "Core Team" members and their credentials at http://www.joomla.org.

In my opinion, this is the best (no charge) web designing software available. Its popularity has brought other programmers to develop custom modules that can be loaded with Joomla for further enhancement. These enhancements make this already superb web site and design software that much more powerful and flexible.

Addons, or extensions as they are known in the Joomla comunity, are continually being developed and upgraded by programmers outside of the main core group. Typically when a new module is developed it will be made available to others at a reasonable price. Like the main program, the addons are suitable for small to large company web sites.

If you are concerned about support, there is a great many forums that you can read and review for tach issues. Of course, the best forum is the main community support system associated with the web site- forum.joomla.org/. In many cases, you do not have to make a post in the forum because it is likely your question has already been asked and answered.

There are more than a few joomla templates created by third parties. Please do not discount the fact that the templates were created by programmers other than the original joomla developers. You will find the templates extremely beneficial to your Joomla website devlopment needs. These are full website templates ready to load- including graphics.

Well, load it up and give it a spin. You may find that Joomla will replace all of your old website design software programs. For loading the program, you can check with your web hosting company. Many offer a preloaded script or tool that makes loading Joomla a five minute breeze.

Be patient when learning the many different settings and uses of the program. Sometimes the addon modules require a little extra time for installation. However, your overall experience with this mightily equipped program will no doubt be an impressive one.