Re: CIW Certification, worth doing?

On 16 fév, 15:57, "Amos E Wolfe" <amos.wo... (AT) ntlworld (DOT) com> wrote:

I have been in contact with a training provider who offer courses that lead
to CIW Certification on passing. They say it is an "industry standard".

Imagine that I am selling you a car, a Honda Civic or any other brand.
Then, I tell you that such car is a recognized "urban standard for
cities". Wouldn't you feel that I am in a somewhat conflict of
interest?

I have been involved in web design since around 1996, starting with the
usual "home pages" full of animated gifs and background music. I have now
happily grown out of these things and use HTML strict, CSS, and some php.

Good! Now, just examine that
"Top Reasons to Certify with CIW"
http://www.ciwcertified.com/program/whyciw.asp
CIW webpage.
XHTML transitional: why not at least strict DTD?
{
No to XHTML
http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/no-xhtml.htm
an excellent article on misunderstood claims of XHTML - at least, on
serious misunderstandings about XHTML - and problems related to XHTML.
Beware of XHTML
Another excellent article with interesting quotes from Microsoft,
Mozilla, Opera, Safari people, worth reading carefully. It has 16
examples and demonstrations showing the issues involved.
http://www.webdevout.net/articles/beware_of_xhtml.php
}
It does not mention a charset.
It misuses metatag: CIW is repeated 8 times in the list of keywords.
It uses empty anchors (eg: <a name="topofpage"></a>).
It does not even support Dublin Core meta-data.
<div id="mainwrapper"> duplicates the role and function of the body
node.
The string "W3C" is not even listed once in the whole page: I didn't
check the rest of the site though... but not mentioning a single time
web standards or W3C is highly suspicious.

Despite
<div id="headerwrapper">
<div id="headerCND2">
there is no <h1> element in the page. So, that CIW must certainly not
teach HTML like this W3C Quality Assurance tips for webmasters
tutorial is:
Use <h1> for top-level heading
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Use_h1_for_Title

Etc, etc.... So, based on all this and much more, I recommend not to
spend a dime on that CIW website.

If you still want to perfect your web design skills, visit these
pages:

Web Design Tips
http://www.gtalbot.org/NvuSection/Nv...#WebpageDesign

Web development mistakes, redux
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archiv...istakes_redux/

Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/bigg...1995-2015.html

Opquast
http://en.opquast.com/

During this time I have always done web design and related stuff part-time
but would like to concentrate more on this in the future. Do employers and/
or customers know about / recognise the CIW generally?

I never ever heard of CIW before your post today.
Every claim the CIW website makes which can not be verified by
yourself is to be taken with relativity. They claim 110,000
certifications but, even if such number is truthful, what is their
certification worth? ... because I know their webpage coding practices
are far, very far from excellent ones.

And at a cost of around £3000, is it worth the money?

Wow!! No comment.

Gérard