I’ve recently been a part of a recruitment and noticable, still many people use emails like hotmail, yahoo etc. so they just end up in the bottom of the pile. Lots of them didn’t even have anything to show, proving they even knew what HTML or CSS was.

So I would say it’s easy to get a job if you’re great. Hell, even you’re just good. Just go out there and show that you can produce a website that is semanticly good and user-fiendly. If you have a fantastic website, a company may not even care that you’re a PHP developer even if they’re actually looking for an ASP.NET developer. Just show them that you’re able to learn quickly and that you can produce a user-friendly website. The important thing is that you can adapt and learn.

That’s my thoughts…

There may be occasions when I might but honestly, probably not; for all the reasons explained above. If you’re applying for a job as a web developer/designer and you have a hotmail account – seriously what are you thinking? Take 30 minutes and £10 and get a unique domain name.

You can’t see people’s email addresses in these comments, but it’s not a shock for me to see all bar one of the commenters have either a gmail (or a unique domain name) for their email address (even you). Read into that what you will.

“Also, you wouldn’t hire someone you have never heard of?”

Michael, I mustn’t have made myself too clear here… You might be a great web developer but the vast majority of jobs are passed through word of mouth, not through advertisements. If you’re looking for work – you’ve got to get out there find those vacancies before the recruitment agencies get to them.

I don’t mean I’d only hire web ‘celebrities’ rather I’d only be able to hire people who I knew of beforehand or had applied. The point is if you’re out of work but you’re on twitter/have a blog/comment on a blog/go to a networking event and manage to make contact with a local person in the industry you’re chances of getting work are greatly increased.

“# building HTML/CSS templates from a Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks design” – Only for junior developers?

This shows you haven’t read the article properly because I’ve mentioned that this a basic skill that a junior web developer will probably be expected to have. I’m a front end developer by trade so why on earth would I suggest that my major skill that makes up 90% of my income is only for juniors?

Also, you wouldn’t hire someone you have never heard of? So basically you’ll only hire Andy Clarke, or Jeremy Keith.

“# building HTML/CSS templates from a Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks design” – Only for junior developers?

The last agency I worked gave me the title of “web developer” – Only a very small part of the job was focused on server-side technology, and even then it was normally only Velocity stuff.

“Web designer” carries a lot of bad connotations – to me the term === okay at Photoshop, not too bad at CSS/XHTML, but sucks at JavaScript.

I call myself a web developer because I spend most of my time programming in JavaScript.

FYI, the company I worked for would’ve called people like you “software engineers”

Anyway, cut the long story short, still not employed after 3 months of searching and I have now contacted agencies offering to work for free. Will get a weekend odinary job to keep the money coming in.

All I want is an entry point. God knows I am geared up and ready to go.

Thanks for the inspiration.

Last names?

But you can get practical experience, be it doing websites for friends or family and for freelance customers, to me this would divide people into to categories.
Those that have qualification and have been job searching. and those that have qualification and job searching, and have been actively gaining experience and honing/learning skills.

If you can go to an interview with several sites both on course and in your own time it shows:

Pro Active, Project Management (especially if paid for by a business), Customer interaction skills, Technical skills and Eager to learn, to name but a few.