How I learned to develop websites

[Col South]

While I'm new to domaining I'm not new to developing websites, which is something I see a lot of rudimentary questions being asked about. It seems like development is a nice skill to have as a domainer but it also seems like only a very select few have cracked it. Maybe people get lost because they don't know where to begin. Maybe they just don't want to invest the time in themselves. I decided to do a little write up outlining my web development journey and experiences. Hopefully it can open the door to web development for you. This one is for the people know literally don't know where to start.

I can't remember exactly how it came about but when I was about 14 my parents had their roof resurfaced and I ended up making a website for the roofer. At this point I had only dabbled in HTML, CSS, a little PHP. I had very little web development experience but I was very eager and knew it was something I wanted to do. The website I built was pretty basic but it had a nice graphical layout with multiple pages and I build a little admin login area where the client could edit some basic things such as blocks of text that are on the pages of his website, the email address that the contact form went to, etc. I was paid £250 for the job, which was great.

Fast forward to now over 10 years later. I studied IT at college and Software Engineering at University, gaining a 1st class honours degree. I've had 5 industry jobs in web development / software engineering (3 of my 5 jobs have been predominantly web development). I've worked as a freelance web developer for a number of clients including one medium sized commercial contract for mid £X,XXX and some medium-high profile musicians / artists. I'm now employed as a research assistant at a University, developing a central database to support their research. The database's interface is... you guessed is... web development.

So how did I manage to learn enough web development on the job to create that first website and how did I keep that learning going since?

I started off using a website called Tizag.com. This is how I created that website for the roofer. It has tutorials for the real fundamentals of web development. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL. It explains what they all are, how they all fit together and gets you started using them. I honestly to this day believe that I got lucky to find this website at the right time because it is absolutely the best place to start in my opinion. Work through the tutorials on the left hand side of the page, they won't take you long. It will maybe take you a few weeks to casually work through the tutorials and not only will you learn the fundamentals of web development to the level of being about to actually develop a dynamic website from scratch, but it will give you a great platform to continue to progress from thereafter.

You don't actually need to do all the tutorials. I recommend these tutorials only and in this order:

• HTML Tutorial
• CSS Tutorial
• Javascript Tutorial
• PHP Tutorial
• MySQL Tutorial
• Ajax Tutorial

For the first three you don't need any special development environment other than notepad and your internet browser. You can create a HTML file (such as index.html) on your computer's hard drive. If you then open that file with your internet browser then it will be displayed. Success. You can also use CSS and JavaScript like this without any problems. It is when you want to use server-side technologies (i.e. PHP or MySQL) that you need to actually have a web server running to serve your pages. PHP is a scripting/programming language which allows your pages to have conditional logic and lots of other dynamic behaviour. It generates the HTML page dynamically which sent to the browser (client) to display. The possibilities of it are endless. MySQL is a database engine. Typically you would store information in your MySQL database and connect to it with PHP as it generates the page. PHP and MySQL are both free. You can either install your own development environment (search for either 'LAMP' on Linux, 'WAMP' on Windows, 'MAMP' on Mac) or you can have a remote web server which you upload your files to as you work on them and test them that way. You will need a remote web server to host your website once it's ready.

Once you have the fundamentals in place it is really just about building things. Have an idea, build it. If there's something you don't know how to do, search on the internet to find the solution. If you keep making websites then you will be constantly solving problems and every time you do, not only do you get a great feeling of satisfaction but you also increase your knowledge and understanding. This is the way to learn. I recommend stackoverflow.com for figuring out how to sole the problems you come up against.

So there it is, that is how you learn to develop websites. Once you have the foundation you can also learn a framework/CMS on top of that such as WordPress. It will all make sense and you will be able to figure out how to do anything you want. You can continue to use Google and StackOverflow to figure things out. It's a really great journey that allows you to be creative and ingenious and gives you real value. It's a very well sought after skill.

I hope this helps someone and feel free to ask any questions, I will do my best to help.

 

[Hostissimus]

Really useful post, thanks for it!

 

[AndyM]

Great article. It seems to me as a fairly new domainer that most people who are successful in this hobby/industry have some skillset towards development and design. Something I need to teach myself and learn.