Marcia - 4:41 pm on Jul 25, 2002 (gmt 0)

>I do design and marketing.

The two go together, but unfortunately there are great designers who do fabulous looking web sites who massacre them as far as any possibility of search engine marketing is concerned. Not bad for some people, because as long as they keep doing it, it'll insure that there's always work for SEO's.

If you start with a foundation of basic knowledge of usability and what's search engine friendly, you'll be a step ahead, because that will influence your application of whatever you learn that builds on that.

>I did development when I was studying but there is obviously more to development then just html and JavaScript.

The foundation of any site is still HTML, so learning about standards compliance is one of the basics, and so is CSS.

For starters you should know how things work and what they do, but you don't necessarily have to know how to do them at first. You have to use scripts and maybe modify or configure them to a degree, but you don't have to become a qualified programmer before you can use them on a site.

A lot depends on your own leanings, preferences and particular natural capabilities. Very few people can be an "expert" at everything, and people generally do better at what they like. I took a 1 unit seminar course when I went back to school that included skills and aptitude testing, which was invaluable. Something the counsellor said has always stuck in my mind. She said, "Do your passion. If you dislike what you do, you're sure to fail. If you do what you love you'll succeed." I've never found that to be wrong, all this time.

If you dislike working with detail, know how programming and databases work, how to use them and who to call in when you need help, but don't make that your emphasis. If you like detail work, you'd like it. If you're artsy and creatively oriented, love colors and spatial relationships and putting together a beautiful page makes your heart sing, do your "major" in graphic design, which you won't botch up for customers if you're working on a good foundation (which was the first point).

Pay careful attention to what you like and dislike and listen to yourself. Personally, I love to put together a well-balanced page with just the right layout and amount of white space, but it'll never happen that I make high end graphics for people, or anything beyond plain vanilla. But let me at a page to stick keywords in and rearrange the sentences and do titles and metas and I'm a happy camper. To me that's like when I used to do charcoal and pencil drawing and water-color painting. It's art, it's sculpture using words instead of clay or art media. I've actually caught myself looking at a keywords and description tag after it was done for ten minutes, thinking "this is perfection, it's like poetry."

Get a smattering of everything so your basic skill-set is broad, and stay an optimist. If there's an area you're not good at, that's just not your specialty. It's realistic to know your weak and strong points, and when you discover where your strengths are, you'll know what you should become a specialist at and where you fit on a team if you're in that type of environment.