About Me

Hi, I'm Elaine and I'm a front end web developer. I have what I believe are the two main elements of excellent web development, an eye for design and the technical skills to be able to code.

I began my journey into web development by gaining the graphic design skills needed to create amazing websites. The course taken at Nelson Polytechnic was mainly focused on Graphic Design. Although the course was widely focused on designing for print, I picked up some great general design tips.

We had a module on web development and as I already knew how to code, I took that opportunity to strengthen up my HTML knowledge. It was then when I decided I really wanted to pursue into the web development industry.

After successfully completing the course I set out to Wellington to study at Natcoll, I had heard about a fairly new course they had in web development. I couldn't believe there was an entire course devoted to just web development, so I signed up as soon as I could.

At Natcoll we learnt XHTML/CSS, as I had only known how to code in HTML, learning to code in XHTML was fairly easy to pickup. I had only ever used CSS in Dreamweaver, so coding it by hand was a fairly new experience.

Next up was JavaScript, PHP/MySQL and Actionscript. I really enjoyed learning PHP, it was great making dynamic websites and having the ability to use a database to store information.

Overall Natcoll was a great experience, making sure our websites were W3C compliant and visually had to look the same across all browsers was a difficult task but a great general design rule for web developers.

After Natcoll I went fulltime at my then current job at the Department of Correction, I was a websites content loader in the web team, our task was to migrate all websites into a new content managment system.

A couple months down the line I found a job at Heliocell. I was the designer. It's here I started to strengthen my HTML/CSS knowledge and realised that front end development was what I wanted to do. At Heliocell I learnt a lot about building newsletter templates and realising the great efforts you have to go through just to test your design. I also learnt about coding for a web based applicaiton, a lot of thought goes into application development, you have to consider designing a look for all sorts of possible outcomes and scenarios.