About Ben Cardy
My name is Ben Cardy, and I like to call myself a web designer, in and around the area of Portsmouth, UK.
My profesional front is Ben Cardy Web Design, a small web design ‘company’ based in Portsmouth. I do a bit of work designing for Boston Web Studio. I’ve lived in Portsmouth all my life and currently have no plans to move as I’m also studying here.
I study Internet Technology at the University of Portsmouth. It’s not entirely what I expected, some of the teaching is decidedly dodgy, especially when it comes to HTML, CSS and PHP. But Universities are never up-to-date with the latest technology advancements. Mathematics and History are probably the only subjects that don’t change so maybe I should have done one of them. Or not.
I wish I had the technical knowledge to write more detailed articles and to push the boundaries of the technology we use, but for now I’ll put up with learning as much as I can from the great developers of our time.
Designing is both a way of winding down, and a frustrating experience for me. I love to design, to code, and to turn an image into a fully functional web-based application. Designing helps me relax, and to unwind. But it can also be incredibly frustrating if I have to design but have a creative block. When this happens, I am grateful to my friends who take the brunt of my frustration.
I spend an awful lot of time on the Internet, and on computers in general, yet have only a select few websites that I check regulary. Apart from my friend’s blogs, there’s WebRadiance, a Web Design Forum and a few developer’s blogs.
The Early Years
I remember paddling around with HTML when I was younger, when my brother had a very basic book about building your first website, and it was very very basic. But it got me started!
Then I didn’t use any programming or anything much to do with computers for ages, and got back into them around about senior school. I learnt to use some Visual Basic, and do some fairly primitive programming in that. I learnt HTML again, and just taught myself more and more until I realised I wanted to learn some server-side languages. I learnt ASP, and coded my first site in it. I was encouraged by someone in my computing class to learn PHP, which, he claimed, was better than ASP. So I started learning it, and in a couple of weeks I re-coded the ASP site I had into PHP, and it was much much better.
CSS, however, has revolutionised the way that I code my sites, as it has for many others on the web. I just wish everyone knew how to use it properly.
WebRadiance
I also co-admin a Web Design Forum called WebRadiance, with 5 other admins. It’s a fairly new forum, been running for just over a year, but has some exciting developments on the way. Look out for this upcoming forum!
Ambitions
I would love to say that I write articles for A List Apart, or that I’m a major part of the design team for a company like Komodo Media, but I can’t. At the moment, I’m just your average 20-year old wanna-be web designer.
But what is it that I actually want to do? The truth is I don’t really know. Graphic design, web design, web development, whichever field, all I know is that I’d like to be quite well known within the Internet community at most (none of this ‘fame’ and ‘paparazzi’ stuff) for something or other.
But who knows. Maybe you’ll see my name around the Internet in a good few years to come, or maybe you won’t. We’ll see what God has planned for me first!
