Front-end web developers, the “artists” formerly known as web designers are the bunch of people in the company that make sure that the data coming from the backend gets displayed on the browser. They also make sure it looks as closely as possible as the design, that , CED came up with, and that the user can navigate through it, accessing the data.

They don’t need to know about complex OO programming, tricky database structures or how a path is done in Illustrator. They get data from the backend people and an example how the result looks like from CED. All they need to do is to hack some HTML or XSLT together and link the different documents. Piece of cake.

Web developers don’t have it as easy as it sounds though. True enough, markup languages are easy to learn and scripting languages are not much harder, but there is an aspect of uncertainty, that has to be taken into consideration, when judging their skills.

As a web developer you work in an uncertain environment. What looks good and works on your computer can be a popup hell and dire to look at on the machine next to you or on the machine of a customer. The first is not much of a problem, just ask your colleague to upgrade his browser, the second, however, is a problem.

As a web developer, your work can be wrecked by users and customers in many ways:

They can

• use a browser that is completely outdated
• set his browser font to “very small” or “very large”
• use a video card that displays 16 colours only
• run a resolution of 640×480 pixels and still have the large font setting
• run a resolution of 1024×768 but still keep his window as large as 200×200
• use loads of toolbars to make the area of the screen available for your site pitifully small
• turn off any scripting support for safety reasons
• turn off images to load the pages faster
• use a modem with the speed of two tins connected through a wire
• use a PDA
• use a text-only browser
  
  

and if the site does not work with that, they’ll blame you for it.

In other words, you never know what is going to be the mean of display at the other end.

Please submit your resume with full details of qualifications and experience to

E-mail: abcs-jobs@abctech-thailand.com