I was hired by my company almost four and a half years ago as a Senior Web Designer because I not only had design experience but I could hand code HTML, JavaScript and ASP. They had a weird set up where the design department creates the designs and HTML shells of the page but the IT group wrote the middle ware and back end code. (It’s a publishing company and the web group grew out of the art department).
Anyway, they were also doing a lot of things inefficiently one of which was archiving the magazine articles for the web by using an extension for QuarkXpress (design layout program) that converted an article to HTML. Problem was it didn’t address our proprietary ASP includes and stuff and the HTML was no better than what MS Word spits out – table imbedded in table imbedded in table and so on. The guy doing it was spending about an hour cleaning up one article. Multiple that by 5-6 articles per mag, 28 mags and you can see where he was way behind in the archiving. In a meeting I comment that there has to be a better way and that we should consider building our own application. My boss says ok, you do it.
So from the ground floor I learn to program in AppleScript and use REALBasic to build a GUI and develop a tool which converts the articles to clean HTML code and the whole process takes about a minute.
Fast forward to today, I’ve probably have built a dozen apps for the company which improve work flow and efficiency, including 4 DAMS (digital asset management systems) for our photographs, images and ads. I built the back end DBs (in MySQL), the apps that automate about 90% of the process of getting something into the db and the web front end (in PHP) so users can search for and retrieve stuff from the dbs. I’m sitting here today working on a new one which will automatically resize, rename and store our employee photographs so the IT group can use them in apps they develop.
So here’s the point of all this. I’ve asked my boss for a title/job description change (read: raise) and he turned me down. I still do some design work but I would say I am 75% programming, 25% design and on top of that semi-managing the department as he is in charge of other groups as well and relies on me for a lot of the small managerial type things.
Anyway, I like building the apps for Macs and the whole improving workflows and efficiency role I’ve fallen into, and even more specifically for the publishing industry. But I am thinking that I have bumped the ceiling here and maybe it’s time to spread my wings. I’m just wondering if there’s a job market out there for me and if so, what’s my worth($$$) in that market and since I am asking any tips on where to begin.
Any help would be appreciated.