Web Jobs

[Guest tigerhrezik]

Hi all,I am a soon to be out of work worker. (co. closing)I would realy like to get into web design.I have done some basic html sites in the past and loved it.Now I'm thinking of moving into it full time.My question...Is it a good choice?I'm looking for the pros and cons here.My biggest pro, it's what I would enjoy doing.Biggest con, Can I get a job and what do I need to have\learn first.Any help \ advice would be GREATLY apreciated.Thanks, Darryl

[23.12.2012]

Learn XHTML. Learn CSS. Learn Photoshop. For XHTML, I recommend W3Schools. For CSS, I recommend reading something else, before you try W3Schools. Something to teach you about IDs, Classes, etc. Then, download some templates, to get more into CSS. Then you can start learning CSS using W3School's Reference. For web Photoshop, I strongly recommend Tutorialized. I find it pretty awesome.After you've learnt enough, you can start creating simple web pages, to gather more knowledge, and start making them more complex. You'll learn as you'll build your own websites.All you need now is some style (matching colours, fonts, specific headers, whatever), and all you can do is creating more and more websites, using more and more techniques. After you're playing with CSS/XHTML, you can go deeper, and learn JavaScript, then PHP and *SQL management (you'll understand). The best part in being a freelancer is that you can do whatever you like. The best part in being part of a team is that your (plural ) websites will be more complex, as there'll be more of you, and while you can do the design, someone else will take care of the PHP/SQL. In consequence, your websites will be worth more money (one of my relatives paid more than $1500 for an eCommerce website, which is huge).The worst part in being a freelancer is that you'll have to handle everything by yourself. Markup, Styles, SQL, Scripting, whatever, and this takes years of skills development. The worst part in working as part of a team... well... there isn't anything that bad, actually (at least, the way I see it). You only have to handle what you know better, you can always extend your knowledges (or not), you're getting paid, you have someone to take care of marketing, whatever. Here is more of a fate. It's all about the team.

[justsomeguy]

You're not going to find a lot of work doing HTML and CSS, anyone who can download a program can make a web page (probably a bad one) and they don't justify hiring someone to do that, regardless of how well you make the pages. I have all the skills to do that, and even so when someone at the company wants to make changes to the web site they open up some HTML editor and try to do it themselves because they don't want to pay me what my salary is to edit HTML code when I could be working on other things. So you're not going to be able to make any sort of decent living doing HTML and CSS work. If you're going to be making money from building sites, you're going to need to be able to use PHP and MySQL first, and Javascript second. There is a lot of PHP work out there, and there are many, many people who know just enough PHP to be able to break things and ask other people for help. A lot of the work I do is helping other "developers" who don't know how to program to fix their broken PHP scripts, most of the time they are part of a product like a shopping cart that they downloaded and tried to mod and ended up breaking something. Speaking of mods, you can also find a lot of people who need changes done to third-party software (like shopping carts) who don't know how to make the changes themselves. If you know PHP and you're good at it it's pretty hard not to be able to find work. If you can build the entire site yourself, even better. Some of the jobs I bid out on my own time go for $5,000 - $10,000 each. I'm working on a PHP/Javascript application for the company I work for that was quoted at around $90,000, and I'm the only one working on it (design and development). The jobs are out there, but you're not going to find anything with only HTML/CSS skills.

[aquatsr]

You're not going to find a lot of work doing HTML and CSS, anyone who can download a program can make a web page (probably a bad one) and they don't justify hiring someone to do that, regardless of how well you make the pages. I have all the skills to do that, and even so when someone at the company wants to make changes to the web site they open up some HTML editor and try to do it themselves because they don't want to pay me what my salary is to edit HTML code when I could be working on other things. So you're not going to be able to make any sort of decent living doing HTML and CSS work. If you're going to be making money from building sites, you're going to need to be able to use PHP and MySQL first, and Javascript second. There is a lot of PHP work out there, and there are many, many people who know just enough PHP to be able to break things and ask other people for help. A lot of the work I do is helping other "developers" who don't know how to program to fix their broken PHP scripts, most of the time they are part of a product like a shopping cart that they downloaded and tried to mod and ended up breaking something. Speaking of mods, you can also find a lot of people who need changes done to third-party software (like shopping carts) who don't know how to make the changes themselves. If you know PHP and you're good at it it's pretty hard not to be able to find work. If you can build the entire site yourself, even better. Some of the jobs I bid out on my own time go for $5,000 - $10,000 each. I'm working on a PHP/Javascript application for the company I work for that was quoted at around $90,000, and I'm the only one working on it (design and development). The jobs are out there, but you're not going to find anything with only HTML/CSS skills.

What he said

[Guest FirefoxRocks]

I totally agree with that because as we educate more people about HTML and CSS, more people will be able to do it themselves and won't need to hire someone. Also with the popularity of Dreamweaver on the rise, people can weave out their own pages in no time.A web developer's job is to "develop" the web. What this means is that you need to know server side technologies either PHP/SQL or ASP/SQL. I mean of course you need to know HTML/CSS to get the browser to output something, but you can't rely on HTML/CSS to do lots for you job-wise.