Hm, i know of no company that uses custom software to code websites in. You use what you know, basically. The trend lately seem's to be in using IDE's, an Integrated Development Environment which is basically a Dreamweaver but much more towards code development rather then visual. Code highlighting, function shrinking, custom function hinting, function relationships, OOP support and so on. I use Eclipse when doing large PHP projects, or text based code highlighters when doing smaller ones. Personally i use PSPad, other's in company use Textpad, E-Editor and Notepad++.
To be honest, if you're not editing the sites themselves, you shouldn't really need to know them.
Start by answering your questions first, makes it easier.
Industry standard software these days?
Industry standard is personal standard, use what you know, usually freeware and open source to keep overheads down. Otherwise Adobe is very much the leader these days, especially after taking over Macromedia.
The difference between running a personal site and a commercial site?
With commercial sites, it's all about "the ratio", which refers to how many people hand over the cash compared to how many people visit the site. It's all well and good if a million people visit your site, but if only 10,000 of those buy something, you must be doing something wrong.
We could develop some mean arse looking sites but would in the end scare users away. The way we are currently storming through the market at moment and winning some quite large projects is showing that our sites get the return on the boards investment, and believe you me, that's all they care about. The site could be made out of tables and work f**king shite, but if the board get their money back, they very rarely care. It's changing now though with company's actually taking pride in their sites and the way they are produce, especially when we show them that good code in fact means more money, related to other sites being able to search it and so on.
With commercial sites you are also identifying a target market, whether it be single 25 year olds, or married 50 year olds, the way you write and develop the IA (way the pages relate to each other and the basic way the site is put together at a page by page level) will vary completely.
Industry jargon/ lingo that I should know?
Wanky management terms are what we call them, as thats what they are, one long ass statement for something that could be explained in a 1/3 of the brain power, management just use them to feel above their employees.
I don't pay attention to them personally so can't really help here.
Project life cycle research, design, build, aftercare etc
[*]Information architecture
clear structure of site from home page, down a tree diagram to every page
[*]Project brief, deliverables
what the client is expecting, make sure you don't under deliver, and hell, don't over deliver too!
[*]Project scope
making sure a feature isn't out of scope, or that a request isn't out of scope either. If so, advise client to be charged extra for it or advise that for this phase of development, it just isn't right time.
[*]Semantic's
Harder to explain, but for example you wouldn't have a heading 1 followed by a heading 3. You'd go down 1, 2 then 3, then back up to 2, then maybe another 2, then to 3 again. Logical thinking basically.
The level of coding knowledge I'm likely to need at this level?
WYSIWG Editors usually take care of this, but you may need to know the basics like
<p> Paragraphs
<strong> Bold
<em> Emphasized (italic)
<br /> Line break (enter)
<h1,2,3,4,5,6> Heading tags, 5 and 6 are rarely used
Any other advice would be great to!
Can't think of anything right now to be honest, but best of luck. Just be confident and answer their questions, if you don't know the answer, don't spend 5 minutes trying to guess, just say you currently don't know the answer to that.
Research the company, ask about training, ask about progression within the company.
So yeah, good luck and if i think of anything more i'll post up.
