Hello and welcome to the beginning of my journey!
This blog will be covering my journey as I teach myself to be a web developer, from the basics to the most complex.
First, let me get started by giving you some basic info about myself and why I chose this industry.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always excelled at working with my hands. When I was a child, I used to help my father repair houses which included everything from hanging siding to putting up sheet rock. As a young adult, I’ve had several jobs that were centered around manual labor such as landscaping, home improvement, and working in the big-box home improvement industry for several years. Working with my hands just came naturally. The problem was I was never really happy in that field. I never felt challenged and truth be told I never really made a good living at either. So, after years of struggling with not knowing in which career or field I should invest my energy, I had a friend lay it out for me…
“Dude, you deserve better than this” he said while I was working for a low-paying big-box retailer. “You should really look into web design.”
So, I did and… Boom! It made sense. I found a field where imagination is encouraged; an industry where what you can do with your mind is just as important as what you can with your hands. After I made my decision to follow this new career path, I picked up two books to help get me started…
Now, both of the books I listed above are crucial to getting a solid foundation in the web industry.
The first book, ‘The Principals of Beautiful Web Design’ is crucial for beginners as it completely lays out what to do and what not to do in great detail. I learned the proper way to interview a client to make sure I completely understand what he or she needs. It also teaches how to start a basic layout and how to properly progress. It covers a lot of info and is easy to understand. Please pick this up if you’re just starting out.
The second book, ‘Designing with Web Standards’ is absolutely crucial and I really mean that! In this book, you will learn the process for designing a web page and doing it properly. Anyone who surfs the web knows that there are sites out there that are just terrible. Why are these sites so bad? They don’t adhere to web standards. Web standards are guidelines that developers are supposed to go by to ensure that all pages work well on any browser and are useable and structured properly. Lets be honest, everyone wants to go to a web site and have it be easy to use, clearly convey information, and navigate seamlessly. That’s what the sole purpose of this book is. It’s a tool to teach developers the proper way to build a web site.
So, after reading these two books I was able to design my first published site, a photography site for my fiance’s business.
Well, there you have it. My very first steps of my journey have begun. My future blogs will demonstrate a progression toward my goal of being successful in the informal job market. The point of this blog is not to show off my knowledge of web design or even to lay out various web designing factoids, it is only to show my progression toward my end goal of being successful in this industry and to show others that if you are unhappy with the status quo, change it!
Thank you for reading and good luck.
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