Over the past couple of years I have been involved with running many forums, from small forums to gigantic forums housing thousands of users. These were never business opportunities, only activities for fun because I enjoyed the communities I worked with. Still, over my time working with forums I was able to learn a lot about them, from the code and templating systems behind popular forum scripts like phpBB and vBulletin, to the art of policing a large group of online users. In fact, my passion for running websites came solely from forums and moderating them.

Surprisingly, with the correct parts in play, and the main ingredient, traffic, any forum can become a success with minimal fuss. Here are a few rules I’ve learned over my time developing and running forums.

Create a solid set of Forum Rules

This is probably the most important part of starting up your own forum. When you provide users a way of communicating all manners of hell can break loose. To start off with, here’s a few basics that I would recommend:

Test Forum Rules

1. There will be no flaming or insults on the forum. All instances of abuse will be defined by the moderators of the forum.
2. Please do not post anything illegal on the forum. If you’re unsure whether something is illegal or not be sure to send a Private Message to a Moderator before you post it.
3. Please do not create multiple accounts. One account is more than enough for everyone.
4. No advertising in threads! If you wish to advertise your URL please put it in your signature.
5. No posting to adult content. Children may be able to view this forum and it is not in their best interest to post anything bad. Anything on topic that may not be suitable must contain a NSFW (Not Safe For Work) notice in large letters.
6. Keep all posts on topic.
7. Do not post in threads that haven’t been posted in for 30 days. If you wish to create a new thread when an older topic is there feel free to do so.
8. Before you make a new thread please check the forum to make sure no one else has already created it

Document all violations of the rules

Whilst time-consuming, this is the best way of policing a forum. Once you’ve written a clear and concise rules list all users and posts that break these rules must be placed in a staff-only area of the forum. A good format for this would be:

User [USERNAME] broke rule [RULENUMBER] in post [LINKTOPOST] on [DATE]

“Content of post that has broken the rules”

Action Taken: [WARNING/BAN/ETC]

It’s very easy for problems to fall between the cracks while you’re busy running your website and forum, so documenting every problem that comes up is a great idea. At least this way if a user is to repeatedly offend on your forum you know their history of behaviour and can use it to pass judgement.

Get Staff Members (Moderators)

The second you feel that your website is starting to get the best of you is the time you need to think about hiring moderators. Typically it’ll take a few hundred members before the work becomes too much for most administrators, so by that time you can think of doing one of two things.

1. Hire an outside staff member to moderate the forum
2. Hire an existing community member

I’ve always stuck to existing community members that I know I can trust. At the end of the day all they can do is follow the rules you’ve set down, and if they don’t they’re out on their ass and banned from the forums completely. This leads me onto my next point.

Staff Rules

It may seem excessive to give staff members/moderators their own rules to live by, but it’s required for your grand plans to work out. After all, every person interprets the rules in a different manner, including your own staff members. As far as rules go, this should only really outline what should be done if a user is to offend, and what warnings should be given and when. Also introduce them to your violations thread, and make sure they can post in it and know what format posts should be in.

At the end of the day, they are working for you, on your forum. This doesn’t mean that you cannot be friends with them, but it’s YOUR forum and you should expect nothing but the best from them. A forum is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship, and you have full control over everything.

Install a great and unique forum skin

It’s always been a rule of thumb for me to get a custom forum skin for every forum I run. Obviously on every forum I’ve been assigned as an administrator to I have created my own, but your forum will always be defined on how it looks and feels, and you should strive for only the best. More than anything else, there is one thing you should demand of your custom skin…

What you should demand is originality.

Chances are that most of your members have at least viewed another forum before, and most of them look the same, boring and mundane. Get a designer to create and code you an original design, tailored exactly how you want it. Whilst some templating systems are hard to develop for many of them are fairly easy to customise in any way you wish, so if a designer tells you that it cannot be done ask them to come up with similar alternatives, along with an explanation as to why it cannot be done. Chances are some designers won’t take on an extremely difficult task without some pushing, so give them a nudge and tell them what you want. If they cannot do it then go elsewhere.

Of course if you can make it yourself then go right ahead!

Give your forum some personality!

This is something many administrators never really think of unless they have almost expert knowledge of their forum script. On top of creating an original skin for your forums something you should really look to do is personalise any messages that users will interact with. For example, all email templates that are used to send registration and notification emails to your users could use sprucing up! Find out how to do this in your chosen forum script and write your own personalised one!

Also, small automated areas of your web page, like when a user is unable to access a part of the forum, as well as FAQ’s and Search templates can all use some remodelling and rewriting. It won’t take more than an hour to write some new content for your automated messages and emails. If you wish to personalise your forum a bit more get your designer to create some customised templates for these areas for you. If you’re getting a forum skin then you should milk it for everything you can (under the given contract).

Start with few categories/forums

Much like with Blogs, no one will go to a forum if it is empty. You need to create the illusion that there are many posts there, and the only way to do that is to start with less than three forums. That’s right, never start with more than three because you simply do not need them. Once you have users regularly posting in your one forum find out what the most popular topics are and create a new forum for that. Keep repeating that until you have your forum structure!

Believe it or not, but this is the main reason a lot of forums die. I’ve made this mistake a number of times, and have paid the price on more than one occasion. Once I started off with twenty forums as I had planned out the forum structure days before the forum was even up, and through excitement I kept it as that. Even though I managed to get a reasonably large number of members to join the forum never really looked that popular, and growth eventually grinded to a halt.

Give your Forum a sense of purpose!

This is the final bit of advice I can give you, and that is to make users feel that your forum is there for a reason. I’m guessing that if you’re running a forum you’re also running a site (if not you’ve got a hell of a task on your hands!), so be sure to promote the forums as much as possible throughout parts of your website. If you’ve written a popular news article create a thread about it in the forums and link to it on your website. People will need a reason to join your forum and if you don’t have a thriving community that members wish to join you need to use it as a form of interactive contact for your website.

If you wish to, you can also use forums to power some of your content. If you were writing an article on horses, and a forum member brought up a fantastic fact on breeding horses, with permission I’m sure the member would be very happy to be included on your website! In essense, try to link your website and forum together!

As much as I would like to give you an exact guide on how to create a great forum it’s impossible to do so. A forum needs the right content and backing to become successful, but one way you can help is by making your forum run as smoothly as possible and enjoyable for your users. I hope this article has been useful for you!

Design Contests are a hotly debated subject at the moment. On one side you have designers that feel they are losing out on worthwhile business to cheap contests on websites and forums, and on the other side you have designers that either earn their living through these contests, or use them as a testing ground to improve their design abilities.

It may seem silly for someone who designs and developers for clients on the Web to promote an online site where users can run contests to get what they want made with minimal fuss, but I respect people enough not to pull the wool over their eyes about their alternatives. The big design contest website in question is 99designs, a website that branched off from the ever-popular Sitepoint.com.

As far as my views on the subject go, I have always been, and remain entirely neutral to Design Contests, as I feel they do not take away from my target market in the slightest.

If a Client wishes to go to a design firm or a freelance worker to get a design, then on top of their price they get a detailed project briefing, clearly-set goals and objectives for what the design is to look like, and the eventual design created and signed off happily by the client. A Design Contest merely requires that you register to a website and write a listing about what you want designed and a price and date set down for the design. Once the time is up you choose the best one and that user gets the money. Sounds good, right?

Well, not exactly. This is a very direct and impersonal approach to design work, and in the end you sacrifice potential happiness. In the very likely chance that you cannot reach an agreement on a design with a designer during the time limit you still have to pay for the best one. You also never get to see or hear much from the designer outside of the website, and that is a shame when you have your heart set on a certain design. It really restricts you if you like to shop around for a good deal.

In a way it’s like buying a new car. You may want a fast, red sports car. If you go to a dealer you can shop around various places for the car you like, which can be stressful and time-consuming. In the end you could always ask a car expert to get the best possible car for you, and you may end up with a great one. Still, you could end up wishing for a Ferrari and ending up in a Fiat. It is a definite risk, and one you should consider when dealing with contests.

For designers it’s a great way to push creative muscle. Instead of taking on clients that want an exact design you are given freedom to express yourselves a bit more. At the end of the day you have a piece for your portfolio, regardless of if you win or not. Still, it’s cheap work and rarely pays brilliantly.

I don’t see the contest debate as a purely two-sided argument. People want to take sides without thinking of the situations facing other designers. Whilst it may seem like cheap money to people in America in eastern countries it may be a lot of money and a vital part of a designers income. On my online travels I’ve seen several designers from countries like India that use contests as a main source of income. Yes, design contests devalue certain markets, but as designers and developers it’s something we have to learn to live with. What we designers and developers need to be working on is our business practices and our skillsets, and if design contests help designers become better then I’m okay with it.

If you are a client that’s looking for a website, logo or print media to be created then there is a lot of selection. However, it’s best to look at all the alternatives before a decision is made. If you go with a design firm or freelancer you can get a cheap website that is usable, looks great and conforms to standards, or you could get an expensive web-veteran that drags code and images from projects in the 90’s and provides nothing but headaches as you throw ideas back and forth. On the other side you could enter a design contest and get a cheap design that looks great, or a reasonably expensive fee for a design you’re either not happy with or feel that doesn’t represent what you wanted.

You may believe there to be some bias, but I truthfully believe that a personal approach is needed for design and development projects. Still, I occasionally see some great designs come from design contests on forums, so it’s really down to client preference.

Both Computer Science and Software Engineering are fantastic subjects that deserve credit for the research and output they’ve delivered to our world. These fields have brought us countless applications that we use on an hourly basis throughout our lives, and they now branch out and take on different approaches to further improve our lives in the form of subjects like Bioinformatics.

Aside from this, both fields are the educational equivalent of a yapping dog, a dog that’ll shit on your rugs and tear your shoes to pieces just to get some attention and recognition. I mean, why else would we even call ourselves Computer Scientists or Software Engineers?!

It’s because we crave to be known as professionals. Lawyers have extremely taxing and important jobs, and Doctors use their knowledge to save peoples’ lives. At best a Software Engineer will write code for an important piece of equipment. Aside from the field of Human Computer Interaction there is little science in Computer Science and there is no ‘engineering’ in Software Engineering. In both Science and Engineering we have rules to prove that the logic is correct. An engineer that is building a bridge relies on heavy maths and physics, and at best uses applied science to simulate the situation. In the end, if the bridge stays up and can handle a load it is ‘proven’ correct. In Science the process can prove the outcome, and through logic and reasoning the outcome can be proven correct.

Computer Scientists and Software Engineers aren’t tied into the rules of God like engineers or scientists. The domain in which they can work within is the domain of the world. Software is not constrained to known limits, and we’re still improving what we can do with software and computational power. We run on requirements and domain variables or constraints that limit what we can accomplish.

Most already believe that Computer Science is misleading, that what we do is not at all a science. Most believe it to be Maths, and I would say even that is wrong. Maths is used in Computer Science, but it is also used in Business. Is Business just Mathematics? Definitely not! It’s fairly close to being Mathematics in that we can argue whether Mathematics is proven logic, or whether it is an invention of man to explain things beyond our comprehension. I agree that Mathematics is strongly tied to Computer Science, but only because we make it so.

To call CS a Science and SE Engineering is almost insulting to true Scientists and Engineers, and to call either a true ‘profession’ in the highest sense of the word is insulting true professional workers. It’s true that we create beauty and envision art in the software and rules that we create, but we are just in a new field of discovery, much like how Ramon Lull envisioned the wonders of Mathematical Logic to be a proven theory of the existance of God.

So let’s not get too carried away with semantics. Let’s just work on creating great software, okay?

If you’ve never heard of MySpace or Facebook then I’m assuming that you’re new to the Internet. In short, MySpace and Facebook are two social networking websites where users can register and set up a profile about themselves, and use these profiles to interact with the profile’s of other users. Of course there is far more to these websites than this, but at its basic functionality, including powerful photo tools this is all they are.

Much like the rest of the Internet Social Networking websites suffer from spam and malicious advertising. Some users will register with the full intent of using their profiles, groups and/or photo’s to promote their products and websites.

The entire point of these websites is to talk to friends and to make new ones. Whilst these websites are full of potential customers these users have not registered to be lied to. It’s almost like trying to talk to someone you don’t know at a bar about mobile phone tarrifs or what the best social networking tool is.

Online marketing has become an extremely strong force on the Internet, and at times these methods are preffered to those conventional SEO ones. Websites like Stumbleupon and Digg are almost dedicated to the online marketing side of website promotion, in turn making the host websites popular themselves. There are many tricks around getting lots of people to make your content go viral, and one of the tried-and-true is to get a close group of friends that will vote content up on various social networks, as well as promote within websites like MySpace and Facebook. The next popular, and the worst way is to get an automated script to advertise for you.

When I log into MySpace or Facebook I hope to see information about my friends, not information about what shampoo will work best on my hair or what email client I should be using. Whilst both website are fantastic marketing tools they hold strict boundaries as to what constitutes spam, and when you’re not acting like a normal ‘out-of-hours’ person, you’re a spammer.

The whole Web 2.0 thing has annoyed me endlessly for a while now. Whilst there have been some fantastic websites built over the past few years self-claimed entrepreneurs have tried to cash in on this by releasing as many websites they can without vowels in their names. Clone websites of YouTube and Digg appear every single day, with loads of budding developers looking to get themselves a slice of the Web 2.0 cash cow.

Now that MySpace has joined Facebook in the Application’s department, and Google App Engine has rolled out its services Web 2.0 is about to blossom into full-scale application mode. The Internet will act as a method of providing online services as well as the leader of providing information. This may help provide different kinds of information, but a lot of it goes far deeper than that. Realistically, how much information are you going to get from the average YouTube video, aside from gawking at some womans breasts and learning what your favourite celebrity has been up to?

Web 2.0 is no longer really about websites displaying and providing information for its users. It’s become a development platform for all walks of application, from sharing photos and videos, creating presentations, viewing maps, and more. This is what website’s are fighting for now, to become the standard platform for their medium of choice.

This ties in nicely with what many are starting to call Web 3.0 (not another…), also known as the Semantic Web. In a way the Semantic Web aims to define the information displayed on web pages so that ambiguity is lost in what we display. Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation concepts will play an important part in building up the Semantic Web to the dream of the World Wide Web becoming the universal hub of information exchange.

This all sounds great, but aren’t we all jumping the gun a bit?

The Semantic Web is still in its infancy, and as a logical system isn’t developed well enough for it to be a usable standard for all web pages. Whilst it is inevitable that we will reach this stage the early adopters of the Internet are toying with unstable technologies that will most likely be dwarfed by tomorrow’s findings. Theoretically, is it even possible for the Semantic Web to exist? We’re taking the first step in trying to describe our own data, and technologies like RDF and XML are playing an almost naive part in this ‘hacking-together’ of current and new methods of information handling. I applaud all those developers that manage to get usable semantic websites up and running, because they’re working on very little actual grounded knowledge. These people are innovators, and whilst their work may topple and fail miserably from time to time their efforts are the logical stepping stones to the new Internet.

So at the moment we’re working on creating platforms for this information, and we’re still not that good at it. Tools like Google Documents and Spreadsheets are usable, but they’ll never be able to compete with Microsoft Office. You’ll be very hard-pressed to find web applications that beat their desktop rivals. Still, in a way we’re branching out new platforms onto the Internet in areas where only online would they be usable. YouTube (FLV) has almost become the new video format for many, and with many websites offering free episodes of your favourite shows the only thing stopping you from using these websites is video quality. Once those boundaries have been reached what’s stopping free video from taking over all animated media? If you could stream a HD quality movie would you bother buying it? In the same sense, websites like MySpace Facebook are defining user profiles, perhaps providing a link to defining information on humans in the future?

To me the future of this ‘version’ of the Web doesn’t exist in porting desktop applications to the Web, but by creating new applications designed perfectly for online use. I had always envisioned the new version of the Web to act more like a database, tieing the desktop and web application world together to provide the semantic web we all desire. Perhaps I wasn’t far off, because we’re on our way to it with only the tools we’ve got. It’s an exciting time to be in Web Design/Development and who knows where we’ll be in five years time.

For some reason at this point in time there are thousands of people looking to work for themselves over the Internet, whether they consider themselves designers, developers, entrepreneurs or enthusiasts. These people strive to work for themselves or in small teams in an environment where work is not a chore, but somewhere you look forward to spending most of your life.

It sounds great, but it’s going to become a lot less stable.

With the economy looking terrible at the moment running your own business on the Internet could become a bigger risk than it is now. For design studios that cover corporate clients this could be lethal, as clients will no longer be able to afford the premium rates they were paying for top-quality work. The worst-case scenario would obviously be an entire industry crashing, leaving those that do business with them to suffer as well.

The Internet population is still growing, and it’ll only take a nation like China or India to become completely immersed in online life to change the online business market for good. A lot of Web Designers/Developers already suffer at the hands of underpricing from different regions. What if the higher-end industries decided to lower their standards and choose a cheaper freelancer/company to do business with?

Don’t get me wrong, there are loads of people making a name for themselves online today, and you only have to do a simple search on Google to find websites created by famed under-30 entrepreneurs, and just a little bit harder to find sites by those just getting out of school.

My point is that if we all hit a recession then jobs are going to go for everyone, and the Internet is a hard place to run a business from already.

This is one of the reasons I do not wish to be a full-time Web Designer/Developer or create web businesses all my life. I’ve known many people have to leave their careers due to hard times and find employment elsewhere. Two members of my family have suffered this fate, attended university and got good jobs as teachers, all whilst supporting full families during these hard times. If you’re working solely from the Internet and you have no backup plan then I recommend the same thing to you, get a degree!

There are already hundreds more people that have tried to get a piece of the earnings that can be made over the Internet, and most of them fail. You’re never too far away from a story of someone putting their trust into the Internet, only for their small business to crash and burn, leaving them to move back with their parents or to seek full-time employment at retail outlets or supermarkets to pay the bills. The Internet is not an open safe that you can take money from whenever you need it! There’s a complicated code to that safe, and you’ll spend longer hours trying to figure that code out than you would if you were in a secure full-time job.

We’ve reached a time when Higher Education has become easier and easier to obtain, even part-time during one full day of the week! The prospects a degree from any university can provide to you are great, and you’ll find things at university that you’ll never find working in a small web business, things like long-term business partners and vast opportunities in industry. More importantly than that, you can discover your true passion. Everyone has had niggling doubts about where their lives have led them, and if there was ever a time to find your true calling it’s now. Of course if you complete a degree and still feel you want to run your business then that’s also fine! At least with a degree and your own business you’ll be miles ahead of most graduates!

I love Web Design and Development. It’s something I really enjoy to do and creating things that others use fills me with joy. However, I am taking a Computer Science degree for my long-term future and to fulfil my desire to excel. I also love Software Development, Human Computer Interaction, and occasionally I love working out theoretical problems behind what I do. My thirst for knowledge in the subjects I love will eventually lead me to post-graduate work in the future and from then who knows? Even though I have almost already decided my future is outside of the Internet it won’t stop me from what I’m doing right now. Even if my websites were to take off and I became a millionaire I would stick with university and would definitely pursue a PhD.

Hopefully this has made you think about your own careers and where you want your future to lead. Injuries and layoffs can happen to anyone so you MUST be prepared for what lies ahead. Go out there and get a degree! It’s the best way to safeguard your future, and those that you care about.

If you’ve arrived at this page I’m guessing that you’re not a designer, but someone who is interested in learning how to design, whether you want to create web pages, graphics, traditional digital art, etc. Whenever anyone starts something they know nothing about the first question that looms over their head is “Can I become a great designer?”

I believe the answer is yes, no matter whom you are or how much you know.

A lot of people get confused about the difference between a designer and an artist. When you think of all the fantastic designs out there on the Web it’s very easy to see that many are inspired by art. A design, strictly speaking, is the deliverable following the execution of a plan. It is the finished output of careful research and thought, catered to a specific task. When we speak of design we mean many things, an Architect is a designer, much like a car manufacturer.

Art, on the other hand, goes far deeper than the functional domain that exists within Design. Art is primarily a visual and sensual entity that brings feeling from human perception. Your definition of art depends not only on how you see art, but how you see life. It is intertwined with psychology as well as philosophy in the sense of how one person could understand a piece of art, whilst another could experience it in a totally different way.

As designers, we focus not on perception, but on functionality. Our designs hold a purpose and a selection of requirements, and unless they adhere to the strict rules surrounding that domain a design is flawed. This is the difference between Art and Design. We can stretch our designs to be perceived by some as a work of Art, but it remains within a logical boundary, whilst the realms of art are limited only to the imagination.

Only by realising this boundary can we become effective designers, not wannabe artists.

Now that we’ve covered that step it’s time to move onto the original question. Design is logical and relies on millions of known and unknown boundaries. For example, we could argue that the design of this browser window is good because the main toolbars occupy the top area, allowing the main area of the window to contain the web page. Now, for all we know there could be thousands of better ways of creating a browser application design. Perhaps it would work better at the side? Maybe removing the toolbars entirely would be the best idea? Design is about research and learning best practices.

You can do several things to help nurture your ability to design, such as:

• Learn what works through Human Computer Interaction and User Interface Design
• Master your Toolset
• Do your own research into what works best
• Learn from and work with other designers

All of these are good, but all contain the most important part of learning to design, and that is to PRACTICE!

Practice is the only way anyone can become good at anything. Once you’ve found what tools you require to design what you want, and you know enough about the subject to know what works all that’s left is to actually do it.

Talent is a tricky subject, because talent definitely does exist, and there are those that have natural talent for design. This does not mean that you cannot pick it up! I’ve known really poor designers that have worked their way up from creating small banners about their favourite bands to working on corporate product design projects for large companies within the spaces of a couple of years through non-stop practice. These people have done nothing but devote time towards learning to design through both practice and learning old and new methods, designing and creating every single day for most of their lives. Much like with every other profession, what you need is passion for what you want to do. If your dream is to become a professional footballer you could become one. If you’re not naturally talented then you’ll need to start playing at the age of three, you’ll need to vigorously watch football all your life to learn how to play, you’ll have to play against others non-stop and you’ll need to become fitter than everyone else on the pitch by far. Once you beat your opponents you work on beating better ones, until you’re playing for Manchester United against Liverpool in the Champions League Final in ‘x‘ years time.

If you’ve come here looking for exact ways of learning how to design than you’re out of luck, because I don’t know how you’ll become a great designer. The only way you’ll ever know is if you get your feet wet. There are hundreds of thousands of fantastic digital art and design communities out there and a simple Google search can land you on a forum or social network that will help you perfect your design skills. I definitely recommend the SitePoint Forums, as always. The guys and girls there are very friendly and are more than helpful in helping you reach your goal.

There is an age-old question when it comes to attending an interview for a programmer/developer post at any company, and it is:

“What do I bring with me?”

I had the pleasure of being asked this the other day by a friend of a friend. He was about to graduate Computer Science and was shopping around for jobs. Thankfully for him, and for the rest of us there are plenty of jobs going around for fresh Computer Science graduates. I’d go as far as to say there are almost too many jobs available, as this guy had managed to snag his way into twenty interviews for companies within and around the outskirts of Bristol.

Back to the question. Portfolio’s are dominantly an area you’ll associate with a designer. If you look into a designers portfolio you’ll come across a collection of their best work, all nearly categorised and explained. If you’re lucky you’ll get a full case-study and documents detailing the process of how the work was created. Designers and Artists live for their Portfolio, as it’s the one thing that’ll get them a top job.

Programmer’s, Developer’s, Software Engineer’s and the rest of ‘those types’ typically show nothing in an interview, and that’s a terrible shame! A lot of the time a programmer’s work will stay with a company and/or will be next to impossible to show during an interview. If you had recently programmed an order system for a delivery company you couldn’t really take it with you one day just to show your next potential bosses.

Either way, I cannot see why programmers don’t keep their own portfolio’s! I’d argue that it’s almost essential to keep a detailed log of the work you’ve done over your time as a software professional. A fantastic paper/online portfolio showing your programming work, along with documentation standards followed, any special software you worked with, etc. Programmers live in a world of jargon and it’s become so bad that the hiring of potential employees has almost become a sport! Various websites exist detailing the process of weeding out the bad, leaving only the good, but these practices will never work one-hundred percent of the time, and the one-percentage man/woman will walk away and create something great for another company, probably your competitor…

Programming is creating from theoretical and logical concepts, much like art. Many experts and authorities in the field of Computer Science have argued that Computer Programming is an Art. I believe this to be true, and whilst we cannot show something physically working we can use the same theoretical ideas that our projects came from to show what we have achieved.

When you’re in an interview, how are you going to demonstrate your skills? You could always sit there and say what you’ve done but how would the interviewer know that you’re telling the truth, that you’re actually as smart as you say you are. Also, how are you going to remember everything you’ve ever done in every project you’ve undertaken? Most employers will want to hear more than “I made this thing with C++ and it was good”.

If you’re a Computer Science (other degrees are available) student then a portfolio is almost essential because you have no experience working on a large software project. Often enough an employer will ask to see what work you’ve undertaken at university and unless that work is actually good you’re pretty screwed. A portfolio will allow you to promote yourself how you want to, as well as introduce some of the knowledge you’ve learned that isn’t in physical code. I’ll definitely put a few of my more popular Blog posts in mine for good measure!

If a Programmer were to show a tidy and professional portfolio of their work, detailing everything that happened during a project, the final outcome, and integrate the jargon of Software Engineering into something that actually exists then it shows a person that is excited about what they do. Visit most web designers portfolio websites and you’ll see that these are the most thought-out and well-designed websites they’ve made. This is because they have a purpose to wow their prospective clients. Why aren’t programmers and developers creating portfolio’s and capitalising on this golden opportunity to show something other than a CV or a Resume to their next potential employers?

Artificial Intelligence is a vastly important field in Computer Science today. It’s also one of the few fields that gives and receives knowledge from other fields, such as maths, biology, psychology, sociology and other social sciences. From it’s assumed beginning in 1956 it has built itself into its own discipline off of other discoveries, although work has already begun in the field. Probably the most famous person in AI is Alan Turing, the inventor of the Turing test. For those that do not know the Turing test was based off his landmark 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence and was a proposed test to see if a machine could replicate intelligence. To achieve this one person (the interrogator) must have a text-only conversation with another person and a computer, both trying to act human. If the interrogator cannot figure out which one is the human then the machine is said to possess intelligent behaviour. It drags forward the dualist and materialist wars that have been fought over history as to whether the mind was a physical entity that could be replicated.

It seems today we’re trying to reverse the classic test, to see if we can figure out who is the human.

We are doing this ‘Reverse Turing Test’ through what we know as a CAPTCHA. For those that don’t know what a CAPTCHA is, it is a special field in a form (online or offline) that shows you an image with letters, numbers or a full word inside it, and your job is to type that out in the text field accompanying it. By doing this you prove that you are human and not a script intended to send automated spam messages around the Internet.

reCAPTCHA - The recommended CAPTCHA for websites.

The CAPTCHA has become a very important part of websites over the past couple of years. Thanks to evil spammers and malicious users this is the best possible way of keeping viagra adverts away from our websites. On a personal note this website has already received thirteen spam messages and several mentions on Blogs intended only for spam. Wordpress has the beloved Akismet spam filter running within the software to stop spam posts appearing on websites, but as a learning script it’s always going to be one step behind the spammers. It’s a good solution for a Blog as there is no need for tight security, but
for websites like event ticket websites security is essential to their business, and they have enough trouble with touts trying to claim all the tickets to major music and entertainment festivals around the world!

However, as many of you have already figured out (the title of this post gives it away), the CAPTCHA suffers from one major flaw, and that’s its inaccessibility flaws. The CAPTCHA was once a method to safeguard important websites across the Internet, like online banking sites. However, those that break these security gates are those who will benefit the most from it, meaning that hired programmers and brute-force methods could be used easily to break a CAPTCHA. Now that the Internet has become more mainstream and can be used by people from all walks of life there is a need for accessible design, including the CAPTCHA. A user with visual-impairment would not be able to see the CAPTCHA image, so the next best thing for a visually-impaired user would be sound, so these CAPTCHA’s are accompanied with a sound file.

The real issue here is now that the CAPTCHA has made it to small-time Blogs and Forums hundreds of thousands of users could be missing out on many fantastic websites. Thankfully many have taken the effort to add sound in, but this will never be a permanent solution to the problem. What we need is a way of stopping spammers and general users from breaking the system for longer than a couple of weeks.

So, is all lost? Can we stop spammers/malicious users and keep our websites accessible to everyone?

A lot of research is going into ways of beating the computer, and the CAPTCHA ‘motto’ from the Google Tech Talk on Human Computation by Luis von Ahn is “…generate and grade tests that only humans can pass, and current computer programs cannot”. This represents a movement against spammers that will most likely go on for a long time until a breakthrough has been reached.

In a way, this is a return of the Turing Test, where spammers and security enthusiasts are trying to thwart the Turing Test. From something seemingly bad like spam we have revived an age-old question and brought a corporate and business agenda to Artificial Intelligence.

The W3C has written an extensive guide on what you’ve just read here, and I recommend all those that are interested in the development of the CAPTCHA to go there to read more. On top of this I highly recommend you all check out the master of the CAPTCHA, Lius von Ahn.

The huge switch towards SEO is somewhat unsettling to some Web Designers and Developers. It is a business in itself that is full of uncertainty and false information, leading many businesses down the wrong path towards building a successful website.

For those that don’t know what SEO is, Search Engine Optimisation is the art and science of altering the physical and theoretical structure of a websites’ content and layout to make it more suitable for search engine spiders (scripts that copy and examine web pages for relevancy ) to search through their content. Simply put, they fix websites to make them more attractive to search engines like Google. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimisation and how it should be implemented into your website take a look at the SEO category of Search-This.com.

When you hire someone to perform SEO on your website you are hiring someone to review your front-end. In many ways hiring someone purely for SEO benefits can produce more harm than good because you’re introducing another designer/developer to criticise your own. Whilst this has never been a problem for me I’ve heard that things can get pretty heated when a clash of knowledge occurs, mainly around best practices in Web Design.

Search Engine Optimisation is a business that should not really be a business. This is because the entire purpose of SEO is to fix what is wrong with your design and content. In essence, what a SEO consultant does is analyse your page and tell you how to make it better. The obvious problem with this is that the previous design was not up to your standards, making the designer look out-of-touch at his/her own job. SEO work on a website built years ago out of Frontpage and Tables cobbled together is horrible, because there is little that can be done other than to have a complete site overhaul. If you’re not happy after you’ve had SEO work done then you can either blame the SEO consultant you hired or blame your design.

Many SEO consultants are primarily designers or developers, and their new line of work ensures that they focus on a certain area of their previous experience. When a SEO consultant is dealing with a poor design or poor coding that designer/developer leaps right out of them, needing to be locked back in its cage before its head explodes. As a web professional it’s painful to see companies make mistakes, and when someone shows you a website they made in Microsoft Word and asks why it’s not the number one ranked website under the term ‘business’ you can feel angry at whoever or whatever led them down this road.

One area a designer or developer isn’t at his/her best is when content is involved. A SEO consultant cannot tell you what to write and neither should they, because it’s not their content. However, content is what Google searches and the advice companies should be looking for is how their content should sound. Nine times out of ten a reputable SEO consultant will point out that as long as a human can read it perfectly well it is written just fine. Of course, content can always be edited to include more keywords, but this leads me onto my next point.

At the end of the day, what is SEO? It’s best practices in design and development, coupled with usability and accessibility. These ‘best practices’ were never created for Search Engines, they were written only for users. This is where your focus should always be! Seek out the best practices on the Internet and through the W3C and ensure that your designers and developers are creating websites to the strongest standards.

I could compare it to a noble trade like Building, but it would be false for me to do so. Why? Simply because Building relies on the domain of the real-world, whilst we’re creating within a virtual domain with dynamic boundaries. Still, with either, industry best practices should always be the main rule to go by.

Search Engine Optimisation has done one thing for the Internet that is positive. It’s turned the term “usable, accessible, standards-compliant website” into a three letter abbreviation for “making money on the Internet”. It’s the only language a business understands and SEO has shown the masses that standards-based design and development is important. Web Designers and Developers need to take note that this is the time to earn your trade, because the standards movement has finally taken off, and it’s fixing many websites out there.