Two Letters - C and V

How can these two harmless letters cause so much frustration when combined? Today saw the end of this frustration as I finally put the finishing touches to my CV - something I've been putting off since coming home for the holidays. In the end it wasn't actually as painful as I first thought it would be and with a bit of help from a wonderful guide to writing a technical CV from TargetJobs (another excellent twitter find!), everything seemed to slot into place nicely. It would have been very easy to run over two pages and probably the most challenging part of it all was condensing everything down into such a small space. I cheated a little by extending the margins but hopefully this can be overlooked!

One thing I realised as I was noting down my portfolio of websites was that one of them - designed for my parents to help advertise their property in Spain - was horribly out of date now and whilst the overall appearance isn't too bad, the HTML is so poor that nowadays I would probably be sacked on the spot for handing that in! This was in the days before CSS was commonly used and supported and thus my entire layout was based on tables. It was really cringeworthy looking back at it and so I have spent the rest of the day drawing up a template for the next version - which will be version 3.0. Feedback from the parents will have to wait until tomorrow as they have long gone to bed but with a bit of luck they will like it enough for me to go ahead with it.

My step dad is the most difficult to please because what he wants is very different to what is the norm and acceptable. I remember the last two times he has given me the brief for it and I have had to explain to him that what he is suggesting looks hideous and no one in their right mind would look stay on the page for more than a few seconds. At least a smaller consideration to be made nowadays is the size of the website. I remember having to really condense pictures in the past to a point where they verged on the side of pixellated to get them down to a size small enough for the page to load in a reasonable amount of time over a 56k modem. The joys of broadband and CSS! I'm very much looking forward to CSS 3, some of the new features look very exciting although as IE8 doesn't support any of it yet, I can see us having another IE6 on our hands in a few years time when we are all cursing Microsoft. At least in Europe they aren't shipping IE with the PC so when users do download it, at least they will be downloading the latest version and not an outdated version from several years ago.

Of course, this isn't a totally selfless act, a better website reflects better on me when I include it in my CV.