lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

As I mentioned here couple of times before, I am a student of CIW Web designer course. Last Monday was a big milestone for me. It was a day for which I have scheduled my CIW web design exam, the second of three exams which I have to pass to become CIW web master.

I booked my exam for early morning. I was preparing for it about 9 months so I did not feel nervous that much. But when I start the exam I started to shake a bit. I have never seen those questions before and it worried me. There were cases where the answers were very similar so it was not easy to choose. In other cases there were questions were I did not know if I should replay on the base of the CIW book I have got from course which in many cases teaches proprietary methods or if I should replay on the base of modern web design. I chose the second option no idea if I was right.

So how did I do?

57 from 70 so I passed. The limit was 40-something so I could make even more mistakes and still pass. I am so glad so I can start to look for a job as a junior web designer.

In the meantime I have started one voluntary project which could help me when I will be looking for a job. It is a simple web site for one Slovak cottage starting in travelling industry.

Have you ever entered web site and spent minutes looking for contact details? So here comes the solution how to make easy for visitors to find them quickly and easy way.

The solution is called microformats

I have just recently discovered them on the couple of my favourite web sites. I found them very interesting and useful so decide to implement them straightaway.

What are the microformats about? Microformats gives you the possibility to implement your contact details or events into your web site the way that they can be imported as hcard - for contact or as hcalendar - for calendar events to other peoples address books and calendars. Obviously if the format is supported which in most cases is supported.

Firefox’s extension.

My favorite web browser is capable of exporting microformats true the extension (which you can download right here). It displays the microformats icon whenever they are presented on the site and allow you to display them with a single click. The information is then displayed in it own panel and can be exported and saved to your computer. Could not be easier!

Not everybody uses Firefox so it is recommended to display a link to microformats feeds. I use Technorati’s   feed for that.

How to create microformats contact?

It could not be more simple. Here is the code. You will get the point just looking at it. You can just use this code and change the contact details. You can even include more information which I have not included. For more information visit microformats home page.

This way you can display information not only about your contact details but about any person mentioned on your site as well. That is ideal for organising conferences and seminars. So do not wait and go for it!