“Where I’ve come from, where I am now and where I’m going”

Regarding the "where I have come from" question, my educational background has always been one of the strictly academic side (some know it as “the dark side”). Having studied A Levels for two years in Sociology, English Language, and ICT (A, B, C grades achieved respectively) I had become tired of the constant examinations and purely classroom, non-hands on work and desperately required a change. I had always been interested in website design and everything that surrounds it, which lead me to pick this specific course. Which leads me nicely on to where I am now.

For about a year now I have been gaining knowledge about website design and the technologies that surrounds it. I have dipped in and out of designing websites for even longer, my first ever website that I created was for my local American football team which at the time required a website. The first time around, I created the website using strictly the design side of Dreamweaver, but after a while I noticed the limitations and set about hand-coding the website, leading to a full redesign in the process. Since then I have moved back away from hand-coding and have been focusing more on the design side of website creation. Even more recently so I have been acquainting myself with the “blog” software Wordpress and have made my first step (I use the word step rather than steps because it hasn’t been a very significant one) into PHP. I am now studying PHP further as I believe it is – from my experience – the best way to make a website and keep it updated without having to mess about with the code. I have also taught myself how to use other website design software such as: Adobe Photoshop, Flash, and Frontpage. Although not strictly website design related, I have also been building my skills in the video games journalism industry, and I currently write for a couple of websites whilst also performing freelance writing. All this has given me experience in working with clients professionally, and moderate skills in most aspects of website creation.

I intend to continue building my skills up in these two areas – interactive media and freelance journalism – to hopefully gain a job as a freelance website designer with exceptional copywriting skills to go with it. I believe this will make me a more attractive offer to many an employer, so I would like to advance both skills to as far as my body and mind will let me. Learning many skills also allows me to have more to “fall back on” so to speak if something goes wrong. This is where I would like to think I am going.

To get where I want to go, I believe it is important to complete the HND course I am currently doing in website design, but not only because this will advance my skills in website design, but also provide me with other essential more broad skills such as how to effectively work as a team, how to work with clients professionally and other skills which are equally important for me to become an attractive offer to employers. After my HND, I intend to top it up to a full degree at a university to further advance my options of employment and continue to make me an attractive offer to employers. More importantly though, to get where I want to go I need to grab every opportunity to better myself with both hands – and continue to work at as a high of a standard as possible in every single task I perform.