How difficult is it to learn Web Development?

[ArthurRead]

I'm going to be in school for a while and I need some source of income. My friend has a friend who finds jobs for him that have to do with web development. He says that I could do the same if I just learned HTML5 and gain some experience with the Adobe Suite. How hard is to learn these?

 

[phinds]

Depends on your aptitude for that sort of thing. If you already know a couple of programming languages it should be a breeze (HTML is not actually a "programming language", it's a "script", or more formally a "markup language" but that somewhat irrelevant)

Building a good website is not so much about learning to use the tools (that's the easy part) it's about organizing and displaying the site in a way that is helpful to your customer and even more, to HIS customer so that it draws business.

The tools are just mechanics. Site creation takes a lot more creativity than just learning the tools.

 

[ArthurRead]

Thanks for your reply. I don't think I will be "designing" that much. My friend said that he mostly codes and debugs. I took a web design elective in high school and got my feet wet in Dreamweaver cs5. We dealt very little with the actual html code behind it though.

 

[phinds]

Thanks for your reply. I don't think I will be "designing" that much. My friend said that he mostly codes and debugs. I took a web design elective in high school and got my feet wet in Dreamweaver cs5. We dealt very little with the actual html code behind it though.

HTML code is pretty simple stuff. What's NOT simple is mixing pure HTML code with the crap normally produced by tools such as Dreamweaver. Now don't get me wrong. Dreamweaver and similar tools do a GREAT job of creating web sites, but they do so by creating HTML that is WAY more complicated than it needs to be and what I'm compaining about is that if you modify the underlying HTML, the tool may not like your changes and it will really screw up the pages. I don't know this to be true of Dreamweaver, which I have not used. My comments are based on Microsoft's FrontPage and it's possible that more modern tools don't have that problem.

 

[ArthurRead]

That makes sense. My friend said he just uses notepad, which I guess, means pure HTML code. So I should learn HTML5, or learn HTML4 first? I think html5 is a work in progress but my friend told me that everyone is using it these days.

 

[phinds]

That makes sense. My friend said he just uses notepad, which I guess, means pure HTML code. So I should learn HTML5, or learn HTML4 first? I think html5 is a work in progress but my friend told me that everyone is using it these days.

I have not kept up with the advances in HTML so can't advise you. I use simple stuff that has been around pretty much since the beginning of the WWW and I write VB.NET to create most of my pages in HTML because they are WAY too big to deal with by hand. They are NOT graphically elaborate, just functional.

Here are a couple of examples:

www.phinds.com/bowls

www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics

If you view the page source, you'll see it's very simple.

 

[ArthurRead]

Mhmm. What do you use VB.NET for? I took an elective called Visual Basic, in which, we created simple programs like a calculator for example. How does this connect to html and web development?

 

[phinds]

Mhmm. What do you use VB.NET for? I took an elective called Visual Basic, in which, we created simple programs like a calculator for example. How does this connect to html and web development?

The largest of my sites has 70,000+ files on it and is updated frequently. Do you have any concept of what it would take to MANUALLY create and maintain (constantly upgrade) a website with that many files? I don't think one person could do it much less do it as a fairly minor part-time effort.

 

[ArthurRead]

So the html code in the page source was generated by VB.NET?

 

[phinds]

So the html code in the page source was generated by VB.NET?

Yes, all of it. The comments on each page were all I had to type, and you can have spelling errors in those.

 

[ArthurRead]

Interesting. Thanks for all the info. I think I might try this.