Behind the Screen

Building websites becomes an important skill for grads

STORY BY CHRISTINE MCGINNIS
photo illustration by Evan Abell

On the third floor of a brick building on North State Street in Bellingham sits the office of Carnes Media, a small web design company. Warm afternoon sunlight shines through the large windows into the small, white-walled office. But Nathan Carnes, the owner of the agency, must enjoy the sunshine from inside. Today, he has to build a website.

Carnes is creating a login page for an online shopping site that a client has hired him to build. He prepares the page for a demonstration with a client, but so far the page hasn’t worked the way it should.

“Now my buttons are up here for some frickin’ reason,” Carnes says after refreshing the page. “I’m just going to completely break it.”

Carnes has multiple web pages open at once, all with line after line of CSS code — a computer language that translates into a website — distinguished by orange, red, green and blue text. He scrolls through the pages, looking for the reason the pop-up login page isn’t closing. Sometimes he must remove several lines of code that he has already built and start over in order to fix a problem; a process that Carnes calls “breaking” a page.

Carnes scrolls through the pages of code, muttering to himself, “We’re gonna do this… and that,” while he highlights, deletes and adds to the page.

A SELF-TAUGHT TRADE

Josh Parish is a web designer at McNett, a client of Carnes Media. Parish first studied web design as a hobby in high school. Using a book about coding, Parish taught himself to understand the language behind web design and used it to form sites himself. Parish would right-click on a web page and select to view the code, then try to figure out how the page came together.

“I found there was a method to the madness,” Parish says. “After a little while, people discovered I knew how to make websites and I rolled that into a career.”

Today, website design and development has become an important component of the business industry. Increases in digital trends have created a need for web designers and developers in companies.

Websites also allow businesses to communicate with customers online, reaching a wider audience.

“A website is the basis of communication,” says Mark Staton, a digital marketing professor at Western. “There’s not an organization I can think of that doesn’t have a presence on the Internet.”

Staton spends at least one day of his digital marketing class talking about the necessity of learning code. His students take lessons on the website codeacademy.com, which teaches people how to code for free, allowing them to gain familiarity with web design. Having basic coding abilities makes students more hirable to any company with a website, Staton says.

“I believe that you should go to college to learn what you want,” Staton says. “But you should also pick up practical skills.”

A strong market for web developers and designers has emerged more recently, Carnes says. Larger websites, such as Amazon or other online shopping sites require three developers for every one designer because more code is required to build the page.

Companies based in the Northwest, including Microsoft and Amazon, make this region technology-oriented, but the area often has a deficit of coders, Staton says. The supply is less than the demand.

THE SECRET BEHIND THE PAGE

A website is like a concept that floats out on a server, says Benjamin Cowan-Young, a design junior at Western.

“It’s very ethereal and everyone can interact with it,” he says.

Cowan-Young works at Web Technologies Communications, or WebTech, at Western as a web designer. WebTech develops and designs website templates for the colleges and departments at Western.

Cowan-Young describes building a website as similar to describing a human being.

“You start with the bare bones, what makes a website function in the most basic sense,” Cowan-Young says. “Then, you can start to add some organs to it. You can say, ‘OK, lets build some modules to it. Let’s allow our users to do things.’”

The “bones” and “organs” Cowan-Young describes are otherwise known as HTML code, a type of code used to build the basic structure and functions of a website.

Web designers such as Cowan-Young design how a website looks, what he likes to call the “skin.” The style and design of a site are created using a different code called CSS.

A person doesn’t have to be a computer science major to be valuable to a company, Staton says. Designers and developers can all agree a base level of knowledge is needed to build a website, but the tools to learn today are much more accessible.

“The web moves so fast,” Carnes says. “There’s always something new to learn.”