This is a follow on from my last post – Tips for starting your online career. In terms of the types of functions we hire – let’s look at what any website needs to be successful: A great technical infrastructure, good looks, content that resonates with its target users and a growing and engaged audience. Finally, someone has to manage that entire process.
What we look for in a web developer
miggle is predominantly a PHP / MySQL-led business in terms of development and because PHP/MySQL is freely available we’d expect prospective web developers to have applications to demo. They might look shocking (the apps, not the developers), but we are not hiring you to be a designer. We’d probably want to see some ability at organising content, but the content in itself doesn’t have to be great – as we’ve got others who can write that, but the more your portfolio can show an empathy or knowledge of the elements that sit on top of the technical infrastructure, the better, in our experience.
Getting a web designer job
In terms of a site looking good, it’s all about the ‘front-end’ – the parts of the site that the end user interacts with directly. So a ‘web designer’ job isn’t just graphic design placed on a computer screen, there must be the ability to manipulate front-end code, e.g. HTML, CSS, etc. I think to be an effective web designer you must have a good overall knowledge of the technical infrastructure and some appreciation of information design and architecture – so in some ways it’s more of a ‘Front End Developer’ job.
miggle would have to get a lot bigger for us to hire a dedicated Information Architect (IA) – someone skilled in the art and science of organising and labelling websites to support findability and usability – but I think you can go a long way to being a great IA through gaining experience reworking front-end code to present efficient user experiences.
If you are a great graphic designer, but all you can do is the pictures, then I think you’d need to be bringing more to the table than just stunning designs if you are looking for a full time role on the web – but you may find you can cut it as a freelancer. Most of the pure designers we hire, we hire on that basis.
Getting a web journalism or content management job
Increasingly businesses are getting to grips with the fact that it’s the quality and relevance of your content that gets your site visibility in search engines, not back links and SEO sleight of hand.
At miggle we employ a lot of content managers, editors and copywriters. Many of these are fully trained journalists, but actually, their value to miggle and our clients is their ability to move users round a site. There are still jobs for journalists in the online arena, but they exist in the areas where editorial voice and political or social positioning are key. But whether you’re exposing yet more state corruption or seeing how often you can write the phrase ‘0% credit cards’ into your copy without it reading poorly or Google thinking you’re trying to hoodwink search, if you are writing for the web, you are going to need to know your way around a Content Management System (CMS). And depending on who you work for, that CMS is either going to be a dream to use, or a bitch, and you won’t know which one till you start using it.
At best, you’ll be in a position where you just have to think about your content, as the CMS will do all the legwork for you. At worst, you’ll need to learn some Photoshop skills pretty quick and some basic HTML. miggle’s first law of content management states that the bigger a website / business, the more proprietary (and therefore often painful) its CMS is to use. These guys are in the business of providing innovation and differentiation on a daily basis, so it’s very difficult for the technology behind it not to be playing catch up at some point, or being bent in some direction it was never intended to take.
Sales and marketing jobs online
Finally – getting that site in front of its target audience. Well, if everyone else up to this point has done a great job, then you are well on your way. A site built on a solid technical infrastructure, which is usable and looks good, with relevant content will be one that works well in organic search. But there’s still a job to be done in finding more audience for it.
We’re not at a stage yet – either at miggle, or maybe the industry a a whole, where we can wave goodbye to good old fashioned sales and marketing techniques, but gone are the days where your value as a marketing exec is going to be measured by the size of your budget. Online is making sales and marketing have to be more accountable. No matter how big your budget is, someone will always have a bigger one and so the trick is to make the most of what you have. While we’re not ready to say goodbye to traditional techniques yet, the most exciting online marketeers are those who can manipulate social networks and use Google like the suite of online apps it is. We don’t expect our online marketeers to do anything else other than build audience, but they have to share as much of a context of the other people’s role in the process as they can – and if they can squeeze a JPG till its pips squeak or mess around with an API then cool, we (and the rest of the online industry) will want you.
Online project management – the ‘internet producer’
Finally, someone has to manage the process. A site is no use to a client till it’s delivered and undelivered projects don’t tend to get paid for.
Several things need to be managed in a web project. Clients, expectations, staff, contractors, requirements, technology, budgets – the list goes on. The person whose head is on the block for delivery may not have written one line of code or content, or saved one image – but without them, there’s no site. If building web sites is about mastering the resources you have at your fingertips then the person who delivers that is as much a web designer as anyone. I, in fact, prefer to call these people ‘producers’. And producers just make stuff happen. If you can do this, and only this, then you can do what’s required.
I hope this has been useful. We’re not on the lookout for anyone right now, but we’d like to hear from people who read this and think this could be them. And, of course, I have to apologise to all the functions we’ve missed, the QAs, the PMs, the GUIs, the illustrators, the animators, the sound and video people – all key skills, all of which show how complex online can be.
Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.
A client of ours asked us if we could produce the product photos for her miggle designed and developed ecommerce site, due to launch in July. What does she sell? Tiny, shiny body jewellery – the sort that smudges if you look too hard – and lots of it. A fiddly job if ever I’ve come across one. 
As of this morning, Google has another rival in the search engine stakes – 