About
Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Alex McIlwaine and I’m a new freelance web designer from Northern Ireland. Don’t worry about getting the surname right, most people outside Northern Ireland tend to make a bit of a mess of it.
I hope to use this blog to document my life as a web designer. Good experiences, bad experiences, tips, thoughts and maybe advice for others thinking of getting into the overwhelming world of the web.
I also hope to use this blog to create and share some useful tutorials, resources and tricks as and when I think of some! I’d also like to create and participate in discussion of all the hot topics and trends that are out there and generally give myself another fun thing to do besides staring at obscure HTML and CSS.
I hope you get some use and enjoyment from this blog.
Thanks,
Al
Some Questions
Where did you learn to design for the web?
I’m actually almost entirely self taught. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t become a web designer unless you spend half a dozen years in a degree specialising in the field. Obviously it’s a good idea, there’s no doubt of that, and you’ll probably become a lot better than people like me who didn’t go down that route. I unfortunately could never decide what I wanted to do. In college I did mechanical engineering, then software engineering which was more interested in Visual Basic than HTML. I then did Network Computing at university which was more focused on networks (duh), routers, switches, and more programming. I have been designing websites since I was about 13 though: back in the days of 56k, animated GIFs (everywhere), marquees (haha) and tables. I’d like to hope I’m producing better work as an adult. I read many blogs, tutorials, use google to my advantage, and in lots of cases simply look at code and work out how it does what it does. I find that a lot of fun for some reason.
Hardware and software
I use a PC, which I built myself, with Windows XP. It’s simple and fast and it’s what I’m used to. And I play games…lots of games. I might get round to buying a macbook some day if I ever feel like becoming “cool”. For software I hand code in Notepad++. I think doing it all by hand leads to easier, cleaner code and perhaps it’s more satisfying. For graphics…obviously Photoshop. My browser of choice? I like Opera best but Firefox has too many useful plugins so I use it the most. I test on both of those and also on IE6, Chrome and Safari.