Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Has anyone ever tapped into a college class to have a website designed? Are there any intellectual property issues that should be addressed early?

I`ll bet there is some incredible talent out there!

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Terry McCahill www.CollegeHomeInvesting.com Real life lessons...real education. Email: terry@collegehomeinvesting.com Web page: www.terrymccahill.com

Interestingly, I read recently that most colleges teaching web design are still teaching table-based design, while modern design eschews tables as they add a lot of excess code.  So the talent is really the people who are not in school, who are paying attention to standards-based, table-free design.

What I just said may be Greek, so I`ll try to just explain the reasoning:

When a site is coded using tables, there is quite a bit of excess, needless code. 

• More code = slower loading pages.
• Wading through the code makes editing more difficult
  
• Excess code is not as search-engine friendly

Additionally, a properly done table-free design completely separates the design from the content, so editing or changing a design is MUCH easer.  This site explains this in a more humorous fashion: http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/index.html


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arp laszlo | www.inkwire.net | web design, development, marketing

Interesting...I appreciate the info and links.

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Terry McCahill www.CollegeHomeInvesting.com Real life lessons...real education. Email: terry@collegehomeinvesting.com Web page: www.terrymccahill.com

Hi Terry

I`ve worked with college students in the past. From an IT perspective they just aren`t taught the basics about security and end up leaving sites open to all manner of common attack (SQL injection, cross site scripting, etc). If you`re having them write any code then you may want to have it double checked by someone with more experience.

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Blog - http://www.buggy.id.au/

I appreciate the response. Good insight...many thanks!

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Terry McCahill www.CollegeHomeInvesting.com Real life lessons...real education. Email: terry@collegehomeinvesting.com Web page: www.terrymccahill.com

They are great as a resource because they are usually enthusiastic and motivated to perform and willing to learn. I wouldn`t give them the responsibility of being a technical lead since they simply don`t have the real world experience. I had a summer student and he did a great job. Usually they have new ideas that you wouldn`t have thought of but of course you still have to check the code or assign less "essential" areas of the project.


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Brandon Eng, Owner, Lead Studios

Play sports? Find other Toronto players @ www.sportaholik.com

While I agree with most of the comments posted above, I wanted to make a comment.

As i`m a graduate of the Computer Programming / Systems Analyst program at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario (Canada). I feel I`ve got a decent perspective on this.

Programs like this lead down many roads, as such, you have some students who are looking to go straight in to high level coding (With Rim/Blackberry being located in our city, a lot of us ended up in that path).  The other path was web based programming.  As such, the coders who wanted to work in languages like C# and whatnot didnt focus much on web.  Those who were planning on focusing on web, made sure they kept up to date, and most do use CSS with no tables at this point.  Most of them would have been a choice for code projects in their final term, as they needed the real world experience, but yet had the talent to get projects done, at a level that is acceptable.

Just my $0.02.


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