NITLC help - WEB course

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Evening

Just searched and had a read through most of the recent/ish topics on National IT training Centre.

Basics: -

My company (finance sector) has just shut down and I’ve been on garden leave, now I’m in the process of getting a new job but want to progress into IT. Only way really is work in what I know for now and train at home to change to IT..!

Idea: -

Use payout to do course in a job I will enjoy?
“Web design and development”. - No in depth experience in web design etc at moment.
NITLC seem to be a good choice did look around and cant really find anyone else except Firebrand??

Looking at doing the pro pack starting from basics up to MCTS and MCPD.

Question: -

Can’t find any recent info on people dealing with NITLC – I know about the sales pitch etc from the first guy you speak to (kinda agree they are pushy but I’m ex sales so didn’t take to much **** from him)

But at the end of it I was still bought in, not signed anything or paid.

Any input welcome…

Thanks in advance

Torrix

 

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I done a course through them a while ago and the only thing i can say is read everything a good few times before signing anything.

Have a look to see how much it would cost doing self study as this is basically all they provided me with was the books you could easily buy at 20% of the price.

Look at local colleges that may be running the course as you may learn better in a class situation with other people, but speak to people on here that have done the course and see what they said about it and that it is also what you expect it to be.

 

You haven't looked very hard mate.
Try typing something like 'A+' into Google and sort through all the litter that comes spewing out...

 

Please do understand I am very new to "courses" thing.

Am i being stupid or is the course etc im looking at web design/developing and the A+ is regarding comp tech etc??

Sorry if this is a silly question??

 

It's not a silly question.

There are many fields in IT, and the one you go for will depend on your interests, strengths and experience.
What do you want to be doing?
Designing websites can be arty-farty, or it can be codey and technical.
Other IT jobs can vary from staring at a monitor all day, tying up cables while up a step ladder or trying to fit a server rack somewhere that is clearly too small.

If you want some more advice, give us some idea of what you are good at and what sort of thing you want to do.

If you aren't 'creative' then web design isn't necessarily for you. Likewise if you are disorganised then admin isn't your thing. Do you like working alone, or in a team? Do you mind being called in the middle of the night, or would you rather not?

 

All I have really to go on is the offer from NITLC – It seems ok to me and also covers all (I think) the basis to do web design/developing?

Yes I think I have a creative side and I do like interacting with people i.e. customers.
So the consultation side of web design is good and I feel I will do well in this.

Graphics art etc does interest me more, so I think this can be added into/with the design side?

If I give you a list of the course it may help: -

Static Web design

HTML
CSS
SEO
Javascript
XML

Adobe

Adobe certified expert

Dynamic Web design

ASP.NET in VB 2008 or C# 2008
E-commerce
Relational Database design
SQL express

MCTP

70-562 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development
70-536 Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Development Foundation

MCPD

70-564 (PRO): Designing and Developing ASP.NET Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

Hope this helps

 

Yup - that helps.

I would be wary of basing my decision on something that a TP salesman has told you.
Have you looked at the Adobe certs?

To be honest, you can get some really good books on HTML and web design from Amazon.
You can knock up a simple site using nothing more compicated than Notepad.
That's how I started out.
You can then get some idea of which bits interest you, and it will cost you £10 rather than £5k.
You can always go on to do another course when you know more about what it actually is you want.

The MS courses you list are a bit on the advanced side for someone just starting out.

 

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

http://www.w3schools.com/

The first is a handy little editor for a huge number of different languages including HTML, PHP, javascript etc.

The second is full of a whole heap of info on HTML, XML, Javascript, PHP etc.

Download one, read the other, and just start playing around. There huge amounts of tutorial sites etc that can give you a starting point, I'd suggest trying that before paying out for any courses.

When you do get to a point where its time to look at courses, contact your local colleges first. Most run Web Development courses of one type or another and they'll be a lot better value than NITLC (IMO).

 

Thanks all for the advice so far...!

ok soooo

Im gonna be a geek and do some number crunching, s/sheets etc. Like what I spend on self-study and exams etc but also the added bits that the course provides and see which is more feasible.

The one thing I would like to ask is I have found many threads helpful to put me in the right direction for exams and books etc. But is there anything like tutorials/DVDs etc you can buy or interactive workshops etc??

Cheers

 

As always, Google is your friend.
Or in this case YouTube - there are loads of free tutorials on there.

One of the first things you need to learn in IT is the ability to use web resources.
You can't always rely on other people to tell you the answers.

I'm not being unhelpful by the way...
If you were a carpenter and wanted to find a list of specs for bossing hammers, you might find the web lacking. But for IT stuff, there are resources coming out of your ears.

Or at least the Interweb's ears.

Try typing 'free HTML tutorial' into Google for a start.
As we've mentioned before, the OU has also made tonnes of stuff available for free, so look at some of the level one stuff.

 

Well guys

Thanks Josiahb for the link to WS3 seems really good so far. oh and the NP++

JonnyMX cheers I had a go on google etc and I had a look round amazon etc and in some book stores up town (WOW you could kill someone with a few of the books - the CS4 bible is huuuuugh)

Another question (I promise when I know something to contribute I will do so on this forum, sorry so many questions)

Ok looking at amazon, waterstones and WHSmith, there are about 10-20 books for every area. I’m looking to start off getting books on: -

HTML
XHTML
CSS
Java
XML
ASP
PHP

Now some books have a few of the above grouped together, is it worth getting individual ones as they may more in-depth?

There are ones with DVDs included etc and the different brands like MS, Dummy, teach yourself, full colour etc etc aaaaarrrrrrrrrr lol

Thanks :

 

well, it depends on your level of experience.

Some books will be more like reference manuals that will baffle you unless you've got a grasp of the basics.
Even the Dummies books are a bit disjointed sometimes.

I was a big fan of the 'in easy steps' series when I was starting out. They aren't huge or expensive and they cover each subject in a practical way. That way you can dip into whatever field interests you.

Try to look for something like 'learn to build websites in a weekend' to get started. Then go from there when you've had a play around. Avoid stuff like 'building scaleable websites with advanced Ajax' for now.

I think I started out with something like 'an idiots guide to web design' which covered all the basics really well.

People will tell you that you need to master css, flash, asp etc etc to be a decent web designer. True indeed, but you need to start somewhere. Get your head around HTML, understand the principles but don't lose too much sleep over it.

And practice. You can have great fun just pottering around with notepad and get the hang of simple stuff, experiment with fiddling around.

There are a lot of cheap (or indeed free) tools that help you design, upload and manage sites. Those are all well and good, but they make things easy by hiding what's really going on. It's all very well clicking the colour blue in the text field, but it's lazy. And if you ever do work in the industry it's unlikely you'll be using 'Free-n-eezy-WebStudioPlus' so it's not really worth becoming proficient in it.

You will get it wrong at some point - you'll buy a book that is too easy or too hard, but there you go. You never know until you try!

 

Cheers

Been doing just that, great thing is that when I looked at a "source" i nearly fainted lol - then I messed around for a bit and now understand why things are there (not everything of course only been doing it an hour or so)

Will take you info on books aboard and get a basic one first as you said and at least ill know if its to easy "baby steps first"

I 100% get you on the above I tried to do one for my dads painting company a while back and unless you pay to join they are not "great" - also agree I wanna start from scratch and not rely on those.

p.s funny thing to I never understood how to quote and things on forums unless you use the whole reply and buttons on them, as you can see basic stuff I learned and presto

Torrix

 

There we go, see.
It's all about having a play around.
Doesn't matter if it's a single application or a home lab/network.

When you look at the source code for a page that has been built with something like FrontPage it can really mess with your head. But if you've started from scratch then you will be able to figure most of it out.

My first experience with 'web design' was an OU course - since retired - about general computing and the origins of the Internet etc. The catch was that all the TMAs needed to be submitted in HTML format.

It was all great fun, and we all went through the process of overdoing everything - animated gifs, gaudy background images, unsuitable fonts and all kind of weirdness...

 

A friend of mine was once offered a job by a company who did all their web design in FrontPage, I told him to burn the offer letter and do everything in his power to never mention the existence of such a company again

There are a whole huge number of sites that can help you when you get totally stuck/confused by something including http://www.dreamincode.net/ which is full of helpful people with answers to all your questions.

The important thing is to learn how to do it right first time round, many people 'learn' HTML + CSS in a fairly slap dash fashion and end up producing garbage code which although it does the job is just messy and badly put together (has a lot in common with FrontPage really). This tends to happen because they are in a hurry to get on to PHP, Flash etc and they forget that the HTML + CSS is whats actually going to be the basic building block of their site for as long as its there.

 

Another day!

Ok If you read the thread from the top you will know that I am "on garden leave" now I spent about 2 hours ish starting to learn some HTML over the weekend as "the Wife" thought weekends should be our time (fair comment I guess) now apart from the few interviews I am going to fry my brain with some HTML etc all week.

I can see where both of you are coming from, in other hobbies of mine I taught myself from the basics and went up, not jumped in at the middle etc and used things to get me by (i.e frontpage)

Don’t laugh when I say this but I got really excited over the weekend when I made the background light blue and added a link to an Email address. I think having the basic “background knowledge” means soooo much more than clicking a button in a program.

The page on of you showed me (w3schools) is great and I will now look at “dreamincode” to.

The one thing I gotta ask is:

Is HTML etc all in American language i.e color not colour ???

Thanks very much for your advise again.

P.s do people on here mind someone like me asking sooo many questions??

Torrix

 

Yep, it's always COLOR and not COLOUR.

Nope, ask away

Qs

 

Dreamweaver and frontpage have their uses and places, they're just not the best things to learn basics with.

Sounds like you've adopted the right approach.
And, no, I'm not laughing. I remember how exciting it was to discover 'something new'.
I look back now at my early stuff and cringe - you end up putting a bit of everything on every page - an animated gif, scrolling marquee, some kind of page loading wipe, some text that changes colour, a bizarre font, background image... Urgh.

But it's the way to learn.


Forgot to mention - another great way to learn is view source. If you see a site that you particularly like or that achieves an effect that you think is clever, you can usully view the HTML code that generates the page. Click the 'page' drop down on the top right and then select 'view source' from the bottom.
That will show you the HTML code. From there you can copy it into notepad and have a play around with it to see how it was done.

 

How about this for a page where someone REALLY wanted to make a point about their font size?

http://www.fujinonbinos.com/

 

...using javascript to have a picture of your face bounce around the screen...

Or was that just me?

Qs