Chapter 46: Now What?

By this point you are hopefully comfortable with the fundamentals of web design, and have the ability to balance and integrate at least those languages covered within in order to optimize your site and provide a positive, useful experience for your end users. You have, as some might say, just enough knowledge to be dangerous. There is still far more to learn. Each topic we covered in this text was a tip of the iceberg. The languages we covered, methods and approaches, design techniques, histories and all go into much greater depth.

This text took effort to give you an understanding of each topic, but in many implementations each of these topics is addressed by different parties. Fortune 500 companies typically have one or more employees addressing focused topics such as networking, database development, front-end programming, etc. The consumer research and design aspects alone have created entire departments. Who your team is composed of and how many of you there are become determined by the size of the project, the size of your company, the particular needs and complexities of the project in questions, as well as time line and budget. Similarly sized, timed, and budgeted projects may have distinctly difference staffing simply because one is a financial system requiring input from accountants and lawyers and the other is a museum, requiring input from librarians and art historians.

Now it is time to get some real projects under your belt. After a few full implementations, you will learn which aspects are of most interest or come most naturally to you. Once you have these identified, you have found your niche. Then it is time to go deeper, learning the facets and minutia of one or more of the topics we covered. The references section is a treasure trove of excellent resources to go deeper into any of the topics covered here.