Mark Boulton

33 Responses to “Professional body for the web design industry?”

1. 
   George said on: September 25th, 2006 at 5:49 pm

   Nice writeup.

   I listened to the pod­cast too. What I think the pan­el­ists failed to point out is that many cli­ents have abso­lutely no clue as to what con­sti­tutes a good web designer. 

   The bene­fits of employ­ing a pro­fes­sional web designer and not a front­page jockey are so numer­ous that edu­cat­ing cli­ents almost bor­ders on con­sumer protection. 

   We have reg­u­la­tion and bod­ies for other indus­tries — why not for the web? 

   Sadly I can’t see it hap­pen­ing. It would take even more dip­lomacy than the UN going into Lebanaon.

2. 
   Jon Henshaw said on: September 25th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

   Just because people have cer­ti­fic­a­tions and/or degrees from an accred­ited body doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing or are good at what they do. At most, I would view a cer­ti­fic­a­tion as a </em>good to know</em>, but cer­tainly not as a strong decid­ing factor for hiring. 

   I’m inter­ested in people who are pas­sion­ate about the tech­no­logy they’re util­iz­ing and people who are good at using it. I could care less about whether they’re cer­ti­fied or not with a national/international organ­iz­a­tion. I see this as simply one more road block for a more tal­en­ted per­son in a cor­por­ate environment—an envir­on­ment that’s depend­ent on know noth­ing human resource per­son­nel. Mean­ing, the dufus with the cer­ti­fic­a­tion (but no tal­ent) will get the job, instead of the most gif­ted and skilled.

3. 
   Owen Gregory said on: September 25th, 2006 at 6:36 pm

   In a weird bit of syn­chron­icity, I have in the past hour uploaded a post on just this sub­ject. I don’t put things as suc­cinctly as you (that is, it’s a very long post…) but I talk about the same issues. 

   Inter­est­ing post, and I’m glad to know the issues con­tinue to be discussed.

4. 
   Chris said on: September 25th, 2006 at 7:55 pm

   I think I’d prefer a more club­house ideal than a cer­ti­fic­a­tion.  I’m cer­tainly not some whiz-bang designer, I do this for fun, for me. That said, if you say you’re a web designer all you need do to prove it is show off your stuff. It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re 13 or 30 and at no point does someone ask to see your Web+ certificate.

   Web design is in that funky space between aes­thetic art and sci­entific art. I don’t know how you accredit the aes­thetic and I don’t see why you should the scientific. 

   But, the idea that if there were a group required some sort of proof of abil­ity I find that more appeal­ing than some­thing for which I must take a test at the local Mar­riot. I think I’d appre­ci­ate that more as well. And the, give the mem­ber a nifty but­ton that says, “we know for sure this guy only uses tables when appro­pri­ate” or some­thing like that. 

   I’d just hate to see a world where one can’t get a job mak­ing a web site for some local busi­ness because they heard you need to have your Web+CSS 6.0 Whiz-bang accreditation.

5. 
   Jeff Croft said on: September 25th, 2006 at 8:11 pm

   I?d just hate to see a world where one can?t get a job mak­ing a web site for some local busi­ness because they heard you need to have your Web+CSS 6.0 Whiz-bang accred­it­a­tion.
   

   I agree…and yet, on the other hand, I’d love to see a world where one can’t get a job mak­ing a web site for some local busi­ness because they picked up Front­page or sim­ilar off the shelf of their local Office Depot, made a per­sonal web page, and decided they were good enough at this to start selling their services. 

   There’s a fine line here. I’m not sure how to solve this prob­lem, but it will never get solved without some kind of a pro­fes­sional body gov­ern­ing these things. I’m for it—but I agree with Mark that the focus will have to be nar­rower than some other sim­ilar pro­fes­sional bodies.

6. 
   Chris said on: September 25th, 2006 at 8:23 pm

   …they picked up Front­page or similar…

   And agreed. Wel­come to the mutual agree­ment society. 

   I think ulti­mately I’d prefer some­thing of a peer group. It might sound elit­ist but shouldn’t it be elite? Oh, and to be sure, I’m not even sure I could get in to such a group.

7. 
   Jon Henshaw said on: September 25th, 2006 at 8:30 pm

   I think it all comes down to your port­fo­lio and if you’re a good fit for the com­pany try­ing to hire you. I still see any type of cer­ti­fic­a­tion as an obstacle for a tal­en­ted designer who is try­ing to get a job in the cor­por­ate world. 

   But maybe that’s a good thing for smal­ler com­pan­ies like mine. We’ve passed up plenty of applic­ants that went on to work for large cor­por­a­tions, while hir­ing guys who couldn’t get past cor­por­ate HR, but ended up being some of the most tal­en­ted people we’ve ever worked with. 

   Maybe the less tal­en­ted will get this new cer­ti­fic­a­tion and breeze through HR, and leave us with a bet­ter tal­ent pool to choose from. Hmmm, I’m start­ing to like this cer­ti­fic­a­tion idea. Ser­i­ously though, a pro­fes­sional mem­ber­ship is much, much more desir­able for myself and any applic­ant that would come through my door than a cer­ti­fic­a­tion any day. It’s pro­fes­sion­al­ism via asso­ci­ation, and coupled with a good port­fo­lio and per­son­al­ity, means a job.

8. 
   John Beales said on: September 25th, 2006 at 9:18 pm

   I abso­lutely agree that cer­ti­fic­a­tion won’t work. By the time the cer­ti­fic­a­tion pro­cess is in place for each new tech­no­logy it will already be out of date.  Altern­at­ively if the cer­ti­fic­a­tion pro­cess is developed and released with each new tech­no­logy devel­op­ment and improve­ment will be hindered.

   As for the peer review idea I think it’s a good idea but it will have to be done very care­fully. One of the great things about web design is the low entry bar­rier, (I’d been doing it as a hobby for a while and when I found myself in need of a job I was able to start up eas­ily).  If it gets to a point where so many design­ers are mem­bers of the peer-review coun­try club that to get any worth­while work someone start­ing out has to shell out $250 and wait 6 weeks that won’t be any good at all. I also think the Front­page jock­eys do serve a pur­pose even if that pur­pose is to make cli­ents truly appre­ci­ate the stand­ards crowd. 

   I am a mem­ber of another pro­fes­sional, (or labour), organ­iz­a­tion that will remain name­less and has noth­ing to do what­so­ever with web design and really all it does is charge me dues and tell me not to work. How­ever, now that I’m in I can’t really with­draw because if I do want to work in that field, (more than on the fringes), I will have to be a mem­ber.  We have to be care­ful that a web design organ­iz­a­tion doesn’t come to this.

9. 
   Jeff Croft said on: September 25th, 2006 at 9:42 pm

   I also think the Front­page jock­eys do serve a pur­pose even if that pur­pose is to make cli­ents truly appre­ci­ate the stand­ards crowd.
   

   If that’s their pur­pose, I assert their not doing a very good job of it.

10. 
    M. Jackson Wilkinson said on: September 25th, 2006 at 10:24 pm

    I won­der how Refresh, which is largely a grass­roots effort, could tie into this idea, which is a decidedly more grasstops idea.  See­ing how act­ive Refresh has become in these last few months in so many cit­ies, it would be great if both ideas could be mutu­ally lever­aged to cre­ate a body that has an instant sup­port base and, with that sup­port base, credibility. 

    The prob­lem with tech cer­ti­fic­a­tions dur­ing the boom was, in my eye, it was so corporation-centric that it was tough not to be skep­tical of its value out­side of that nar­row frame­work.  With some­thing a bit broader, and with a grass­roots sup­port base, per­haps that skep­ti­cism could be assuaged.

11. 
    Jon Henshaw said on: September 25th, 2006 at 10:32 pm

    I think we need com­munit­ies and not cer­ti­fic­a­tion boards. Most cer­ti­fic­a­tions are made to make some organ­iz­a­tion money. They make money through test­ing and renew­ing the certification. 

    Refresh­ing Cit­ies is an excel­lent example of com­munity based growth for stand­ards and access­ib­il­ity, but I would have never star­ted Refresh Nashville if I had ever ima­gined that we were going to make it exclus­ive, instead of inclusive. 

    The web devel­op­ment com­munity should be just that, and shouldn’t be soiled by any type of sub­ject­ive cer­ti­fic­a­tion pro­cess. I for one will com­pletely ignore it. Growth through com­munity and peers is the only way to go in my opinion. 

    Provide the tools and resources needed, and par­ti­cip­ate in local and global com­munit­ies. I don’t think there’s a need for any­thing else.

12. 
    Richard Rutter said on: September 26th, 2006 at 8:25 am

    As someone old enough to have gradu­ated when Nets­cape 1 was still in beta, I have a degree in Chem­ical Engin­eer­ing. Before dis­cov­er­ing my true call­ing, I went on to become a Chartered Chem­ical Engin­eer, and with that a Mem­ber of the Insti­tu­tion of Chem­ical Engin­eers, mean­ing I could have CEng MIChemE after my name — as many engin­eers do on their busi­ness cards. Regard­ing becom­ing chartered, the IChemE says this: 

    Becom­ing a Chartered Chem­ical Engin­eer is about hav­ing a good aca­demic edu­ca­tion coupled with ini­tial pro­fes­sional exper­i­ence at the right level of responsibility.

    There­fore to become a chartered engin­eer, one must have the train­ing and, most import­antly, the exper­i­ence. This is some­thing cli­ents of engin­eer­ing firms recog­nise, appre­ci­ate, and expect of a pro­fes­sional engineer. 

    How are these qual­it­ies meas­ured? The edu­ca­tion bit is easy — it is almost always a relevent engin­eer­ing degree. The exper­i­ence is more tricky — one requires five years in the industry spread across dif­fer­ent fields such as design, pro­duc­tion, research, safety. The rel­ev­ancy of such exper­i­ence, and over­all suit­ab­il­ity for chartered status is determ­ined in an inter­view with another Mem­ber. And this is where I think our industry can learn something. 

    If an accred­it­a­tion sys­tem is to be cre­ated, then a min­imum period of exper­i­ence should be required (3 years?), prefer­ably in more than one spe­ci­al­ity (visual design, back-end dev, front-end code, IA, SEO,…). As with the IChemE, com­petancy and rel­ev­ancy of exper­i­ence should be determ­ined in an inter­view with an already qual­i­fied mem­ber — not unlike a job inter­view. Entry require­ments should be demand­ing but flexible.

13. 
    Kev Mears said on: September 26th, 2006 at 8:29 am

    Per­haps one func­tion of a pro­fes­sional body is to help col­late, review and dis­sem­in­ate examples of best prac­tice. I have in mind an aca­demic model where there is some kind of pub­lish­ing chan­nel (like a journal) where peer reviewed work is published. 

    A List Apart ful­fils this func­tion very well, but per­haps more formal research struc­tures might be use­ful to cre­ate a leg­acy of solid knowledge. 

    Or per­haps that whole pro­cess would be too slow and cumbersome

14. 
    Owen Gregory said on: September 26th, 2006 at 8:55 am

    Because of the global nature of the Web stand­ards com­munity, much of the dis­cus­sion about pro­fes­sional bod­ies has assumed that such an organ­iz­a­tion for the Web will have a sim­il­arly inter­na­tional fla­vour. In prac­tice, pro­fes­sional bod­ies tend to have a national focus, with links to sim­ilar bod­ies else­where. An inter­na­tional organ­iz­a­tion would be almost impossible to run effect­ively. The recent emer­gence of WIPA might provide a model.

15. 
    Mark Boulton said on: September 26th, 2006 at 7:36 pm

    Richard: It sounds like the crit­era for entry into the organ­isa­tions you’re talk­ing about are sim­ilar to those for the iSTD. Edu­ca­tion is an ele­ment, although not required, but exper­i­ence and evid­ence of, in this case, your port­fo­lio. Your work should speak for itself right?

16. 
    Graham Sanders said on: September 27th, 2006 at 1:46 pm

    If you’re look­ing to design an access­ible web­site there are already bod­ies out there who will audit your site and approve it for access­ib­il­ity eg the RNIB See it Right 

    If you’re look­ing for your peers to nom­in­ate a good design then there are already sites out there who do this
    
    Mac­ro­media site of the day

    Favour­ite Web­site Awards
    
    Styleboost
    
    FCUKSTAR
    
    Misspato 

    The ques­tion is what con­situtes a good web­site design? What cri­teria are you sug­gest­ing? Aes­thet­ic­ally, func­tion­ally or access­ible to all? 

    You also have the UK Web Design Asso­ci­ation which any­one can join

17. 
    Simon Clayson said on: September 27th, 2006 at 3:00 pm

    I think the nature of this debate reflects the nature of being a web designer. It helps to be a jack of all trades, and this is because the power of con­tent cre­ation and deliv­ery is in the hands of the indi­vidual, so there­fore a lot of factors. We have to keep learn­ing and push­ing on with the latest buzzwords and what thanks do we get?

    Whether you are cre­at­ing pages with Front­page, Flash, Word­Press, MySpace, Dream­weaver, whatever, the point is that any­one can do this for them­selves. Like it or not, web design is a huge mov­ing tar­get of skill­sets, and I just don’t think there is any pos­sible way to have a widely recog­nised accred­it­a­tion scheme as there is just too much to consider. 

    I do think a paid up ‘elite’ club would be a good idea though, mem­ber­ship by peer review and then you get a badge for your website/certificate/magazine/complimentary bottle of wine on approval. Keep it simple, and excel­ling at 7 of 10 cri­teria for example is enough to get you in. The cri­teria are reviewed every 12 months. Any­one who dis­agrees with the cri­teria is wrong. I’d apply. 

    Two more points:
    
    EDUCATION:
    

    Lec­tur­ers and teach­ers who are on the ball will be enthus­ing about aes­thet­ics, stand­ards, CSS etc regard­less of what is in the cur­riculum. The stu­dents who ‘get it’ this will have their light-bulb moments any­way. The rest are on MySpace already. 

    THE FRONTPAGE CROWD AND THE CMS-OF-THE-SHELF-FOR-?20 CROWD (Who are more scary):
    
    Design­ers have big egos and are show-offs in vari­ous forms. If you’re good enough then you’re not going to be intim­id­ated by some geek pir­at­ing site designs for a day job. I don’t want to ima­gine what they do at home. 

    Everyone’s a critic.

18. 
    Graham Sanders said on: September 28th, 2006 at 3:35 pm

    Now this IS nice
    
    http://designcharts.com

19. 
    Jeff Croft said on: September 30th, 2006 at 6:10 am

    Whether you are cre­at­ing pages with Front­page, Flash, Word­Press, MySpace, Dream­weaver, whatever, the point is that any­one can do this for them­selves. Like it or not, web design is a huge mov­ing tar­get of skill­sets, and I just don?t think there is any pos­sible way to have a widely recog­nised accred­it­a­tion scheme as there is just too much to con­sider.
    

    I find it really inter­est­ing (and baff­ling) that when you talk about we design, you talk about tools. Tools are not skills, in my opin­ion. Know­ing how to use Dream­weaver is not a “skill” or a “tal­ent.” Know­ing how to use Flash is not a skill. A skill is “writ­ing valid (X)HTML” or “cre­at­ing vec­tor anim­a­tions and user inter­faces for the web.” Know­ibng Pho­toshop is not a skill. Skills are things like “color cor­rec­tion” and “image com­pos­it­ing.” Illus­trator is not a skill. Skills are “cre­at­ing vec­tor illus­tra­tions” and “brand/identity sys­tem design.”

    What I can not get over is how technology-focused our industry seems to be to the out­side world. When i say ‘I’m a web designer,” the response I get is “Oh cool, maybe you can help me with my com­puter!” Every­one hears “web” and ignores the “designer” part. Why do people insist on boil­ing our skills down to what lan­guages we code in and what soft­ware we use, rather than things like “typo­graphy” and “page lay­out and design?”

    Until poten­tial cli­ents under­stand that what we do is design, they’ll always be will­ing to pay less to the hacks. Until they believe that our skills are more than “knows how to use Dream­weaver,” there will always be cheap hacks tak­ing out busi­ness. Why? Because they can learn Dream­weaver them­selves. They can learn HTML. They can learn CSS. They can learn PHP. Hell, may of them prob­ably already know the basics of these things. But what they can’t do—at least not without a lot of edu­ca­tion, exper­i­ence, and practice—is become a designer.

    I lost a cli­ent once because I got huffy on the phone with them when they men­tioned that their nephew, a high school stu­dent “made web pages.” My response? “Yeah, well my 9 year old daugh­ter makes brace­lets out of beads, but I don’t think you’d buy one for your wife on your anniversary, would you?”

    Hav­ing a nice cam­era does not mak­ing me a pho­to­grapher. Hav­ing a steth­o­scope does not make me a doc­tor. Hav­ing a ham­mer does not make me a car­penter. Hav­ing a trum­pet does not make me a musician. 

    So why, dam­mit, why, is it that people believe that if they have Dream­weaver, they can be a web designer?

20. 
    Christopher Fahey said on: October 1st, 2006 at 7:47 pm

    No pro­fes­sional bod­ies, please! 

    In the world of pro­ject man­age­ment, there is a cer­ti­fic­a­tion body. Many, if not most, of the PMs I’ve met who have been cer­ti­fied are actu­ally pretty much use­less at pro­ject man­age­ment, lack­ing any kind of abil­ity to be cre­at­ive about new situ­ations and the abil­ity to under­stand people man­age­ment, skills that a cer­ti­fic­a­tion body can­not meas­ure. Many cer­ti­fied PMs are excel­lent, of course, but the cer­ti­fic­a­tion is not an accur­ate indic­ator of that. 

    Many tech­no­logy man­agers will attest to the same thing—a Java or .NET cer­ti­fic­a­tion is often mean­ing­less when a pro­gram­mer needs to be skilled at solv­ing new and unfore­seen tech­no­logy problems.

    Design cer­ti­fic­a­tion would be even more unre­li­able. Let this idea go, please. The solu­tion is right in front of us: make your decisions based on port­fo­lios and recom­mend­a­tions from people you trust. That’s all we have that we can count on, and that’s all we need.

21. 
    Mark Boulton said on: October 2nd, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    Chris: As I said, I don’t think cer­ti­fic­a­tion is work­able, or in fact desir­able. Design is often so sub­ject­ive, that passing some kind of ‘qual­ity’ exam is a pretty ridicu­lous pro­pos­i­tion. So, I agree with you. Design cer­ti­fic­a­tion would not work, that’s not why I’m sug­gest­ing a pro­fes­sional body in our industry would be useful. 

    Per­son­ally, I’d like to see a pro­fes­sional body estab­lished for a couple of reas­ons: Edu­ca­tion and Best Prac­tice (in terms of design busi­ness best prac­tice). I’ve pos­ted some­thing sim­ilar over on Jeff’s site about this. 

    There are a few pro­fes­sional design organ­isa­tions which are focussed on tra­di­tional graphic design which have strong ties with edu­ca­tion: D&AD, iSTD, CSD to name a few here in the UK. They provide a vital ser­vice to young design­ers look­ing to get into the graphic design industry. I feel there is a place for some­thing sim­ilar for the web design industry.

22. 
    Dustin said on: October 4th, 2006 at 4:29 pm

    While I’m no pro­fes­sional yet, it’s some­thing I’m work­ing on, and I can vouch that insti­tu­tions are teach­ing greatly out­dated tech­no­lo­gies. Try find­ing a course on python or ruby. Instead you have to take C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, etc. and rely on your own abil­ity to teach your­self other lan­guages. Gran­ted, that’s not as hard as it may seem for some, but for me, it’s all about mak­ing time for myself to learn of these newer things instead of rely­ing on my own self to make time.

    I don’t know if an organ­iz­a­tion would help or not, but it sure would be nice for cli­ents to see one is worth more than what they see on a web page.

23. 
    Natalie Jost said on: October 6th, 2006 at 2:15 pm

    Why do people insist on boil­ing our skills down to what lan­guages we code in and what soft­ware we use, rather than things like ?typo­graphy? and ?page lay­out and design??

    Jeff, maybe a title change is in order. Let the “tools” keep call­ing them­selves web design­ers while the “skills” come up with a name which more closely explains what we do. 

    I’ve been a front­page gal in years past, but had tre­mend­ous respect for people who did what I do today and would never have dared call myself a web designer. I told people I did cheap sites and if they couldn’t afford a real web designer, I could throw some­thing together until they could (or until I became one). It’s how I learned, so I def­in­itely don’t think people in that boat should be drowned, but I do agree that there should be a pro­fes­sional sep­ar­a­tion of some kind, just not sure what’s best. 

    So why, dam­mit, why, is it that people believe that if they have Dream­weaver, they can be a web designer?

    Those exact words have come out of my mouth! Actu­ally, I was told in an inter­view earlier this year that I had to design in Dream­weaver or they couldn’t hire me. Need­less to say I didn’t get the job. I’ve found this to be pretty com­mon in the area I live. Other places I inter­viewed said basic­ally the same thing. The agen­cies want the factory-produced web­sites that can be whipped up in a few hours because it makes more money for them. Me, I’m not JUST in it for the money, which seems to be the case among many people here, but if I’m not using “the tools” I’m out. And the cli­ents don’t know the dif­fer­ence, hon­estly. I get samples sites sent to me all the time from pro­spects who want their site to look like some other site. These sites are cookiecut­ter sites prob­ably slapped together and they hon­estly can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between those sites and the ones in my port­fo­lio, which until I get past their ignor­ance, is pretty insulting.

    One point in regard to cer­ti­fic­a­tion, I do think there’s a dif­fer­ence between a developer and a designer. I see a lot of developers who go by designer when they rarely if ever work with graph­ics. I think that brings down design­ers a lot — in the same way it would bring down the level of developer if I were to tell people I was a developer. I can tweak some code and okay, writea little with a gun to my head, but I’m no developer. I do graphics/css mostly, so it would be hurt­ful to my beau­ti­ful developer peers to cay I’m a developer when I occa­sion­ally develop. I like to see the same respect from developers. If you only occa­sion­ally design, you’re prob­ably not a designer (though I’ll bet you’re a fab­ulous developer). :)

24. 
    WD Milner said on: October 8th, 2006 at 12:57 am

    I agree with a good deal of the above. The men­tion of cre­at­ing graph­ics brings up on prob­lem with the defin­i­tion. Not all web design­ers have graph­ics back­grounds, or are graph­ics design­ers (though most could man­age an icon or two) yet I see in many dis­cus­sions that if you can’t do this you aren’t a designer but a developer. 

    A developer to my mind is one who does the beha­vi­oural aspect of a web site. Script­ing, applic­a­tions and data­base pro­gram­ming, cre­at­ing hooks, etc. The designer is one who cre­ates the site concept, does lay­out, present­a­tion and styl­istic cod­ing (though I hate call­ing (x)html/css/xml/etc cod­ing). They may do the graph­ics design if they are able, or use the ser­vices of a graph­ics designer.

    Now they may, espe­cially in the case of a small inde­pend­ent shop all be done by one per­son, but they can also be more of a con­tractor where a staff provides the vari­ous com­pon­ents of an integ­rated whole. 

    This is why I think any uni­ver­sal cer­ti­fic­a­tion pro­gram is doomed to fail­ure. As I indic­ated in a dis­cus­sion else­where on this topic there are any of a num­ber of organ­iz­a­tions that pur­port to do this sort of thing now. Most people have never heard of them and lend them little cre­dence if they have. 

    Most ?web design­ers? of my acquaint­ance are mostly self-taught rather than aca­dem­ic­ally edu­cated in the field and , as has been stated by a pre­vi­ous poster, are of neces­sity jacks-of-all trades in script­ing, lay­out, cod­ing and occa­sion­ally graphics. 

    Any cer­ti­fic­a­tion would need endorse­ments in vari­ous fields lead­ing to the mor­ass that plagues Microsoft cer­ti­fic­a­tions. Such pro­grams are costly to run and are reflec­ted in the price of the cer­ti­fic­a­tions. This has the poten­tial to be oner­ous for and/or shut out many smal­ler designer/developers who, while they may be per­fectly com­pet­ent, are not so aflu­ent as to be able to play the ?cer­ti­fic­a­tion game?. 

    I know it is easy to cri­ti­cise without offer­ing altern­at­ives but I?m not sure what the altern­at­ives would be. The fact that it is easy to find prob­lems to cri­ti­cise means that the concept needs fur­ther development. 

    Per­haps some­thing more along the lines of the Soci­ety of Graphic Design­ers of Canada or Amer­ican Insti­tute of Graphic Arts would be bet­ter than the Engin­eer­ing model.

25. 
    Zach Katkin said on: October 11th, 2006 at 10:05 pm

    Very nice post. As a farely new “web” designer (who is also in col­lege) I see real world examples of all of the issues you men­tioned. Most not­ably our edu­ca­tion sys­tem is simply not setup to teach the industry at the cur­rent rate it is grow­ing and changing. 

    I also liked your com­ment about the following: 

    Jon poin­ted out within the dis­cus­sion that I am a mem­ber of the iSTD and as such (in the con­text of the dis­cus­sion), it sets me, and mem­bers of sim­ilar organ­isa­tions, apart from the ?Front Page design­ers?. True. But, sets me apart to whom? My peers or my clients?

    I pre­vi­ously worked at an attor­ney mar­ket­ing firm and attor­neys seem to con­tinue to suf­fer this same mind­set of accred­it­a­tion. Mar­ket­ing a pro­fes­sional ser­vice, like web design is very dif­fer­ent from mar­ket­ing a phys­ical product. The cli­ent is NOT qual­i­fied to judge the qual­ity of your work (the draft­ing of a trust, or the cod­ing of a site), so accred­it­a­tions are fairly use­less to the uninitiated.

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