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Web Designer Interview Questions

Fri, 12/12/2008 - 21:36 — thehuby

The web developer job at eConnected compromised of two core components; XHTML/CSS development and PHP work. Other aspects of the job included JavaScript, MySQL and support of existing website, however I felt that these were secondary requirements.
I split the interview into two sections; general interview questions and a test of the candidates technical ability in the core aspects of the job.
Warm Up
I wanted to start off the technical questions with just some easy questions to get them relaxed (developers seem to be a nervous bunch on the whole!). These questions also served to identify the candidates who really didn't have enough starting knowledge or impetus to be suitable for the job.

  1. Can you explain the difference between server-side scripting and client-side scripting.
  2. Can you explain what XHTML is and how it differs from HTML. What about Tranisitional and Strict Doctypes?
  3. How do you keep your web design knowledge up to date?

PHP, XHTML & CSS Tests
CSS Test
I was looking for a decent understanding of CSS syntax in this test (application of CSS is tested separately). I wanted to make sure the candidate knew enough CSS to get by.

Answers:

  1. No closing ; for each property/value pair
  2. Using ; as a separator instead of , 3 font-face doesn't exist in CSS (looking for font-family)
  3. Tiny is not a valid font size

XHTML Test
XHTML is fairly straight forward and anyone who could deal with the CSS test should be able to breeze through this; however just to be thorough I wanted to go through this exercise.

Answers

  1. There is no document type declaration.
  2. The title should appear between head elements.
  3. The closing heading tag is incorrect. It should be an h1.
  4. The paragraph containing the non-breaking space entity,  , should be removed as we should not be using HTML elements for layout purposes.
  5. The & should be written as & or &
  6. Bonus points for mentioning that a more descriptive page title or the use of meta data would increase the chances of the page being usefully indexed by search engines.

PHP Test
For the PHP test I put together 6 pieces of simple code and asked the candidates to explain what was happening or to tell me what the outcome was.
Whilst these were written in PHP they are very general questions and should be answerable by anyone with decent development knowledge.

Answers

  1. 10 - Trick questions relating to the scope of the the variable $num;
  2. abc - String concatenation
  3. $b - $a is a boolean and $c is an array
  4. 0 - Simple logic test
  5. Foreach loop builds an unordered list if there are any elements in the array $arr. It prints out the key and value of each item in the array.
  6. A class called person with "name" and "email" variables with getter and setter methods. set_email uses regular expressions to check if the email passed is valid and returns a boolean notification.

XHTML/CSS Coding Approach
We had previously tested to see if the candidate had a basic knowledge of the syntax of XHTML and CSS but this is a distinct skill from the approach to the coding of a web page.
In the final step I gave the candidate a screengrab from one of our websites and asked them to discuss how they would approach the coding of the page.