Web design and development can be a bit confusing. Every year, there are so many different web design trends that you need to keep up with. For a newbie like me, it can get so overwhelming that sometimes I don’t think if I will ever catch up. But my friends, who are much more experienced web developers, told me to take it a step at a time.
Pick a programming language that you’re passionate about and start from there
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I decided to get started on WordPress development and PHP first! Yay, me!
Learning about WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) on the planet. A CMS is like a platform you put on top of your base code to make it easier for normal people (non-coders) to manage and make tweaks to their website.
WordPress now powers 30% of the Internet! The next closest are Joomla and Drupal, which have 3.1% and 2.2% market share respectively. That’s a big difference!
If you want to jump on the bandwagon, there is the official getting started guide from Automattic that you can check out. Automattic is the company that started WordPress. Mark Wullenberg started WordPress way back in 2003 and I’m sure even he can’t image how big WordPress would turn out to be.
It started out as a blogging platform, similar to Blogspot. But over the years, it has grown into a full-fledged website that even big companies like CNN use to to power their platform.
Can I learn web development by using WordPress?
But is it cheating if I use WordPress to learn about web design? Isn’t the point of it to learn how to code? If I use a CMS, then doesn’t it defeat the purpose?
I think it depends on how you look at it.
There is more to web design than just the code. There are things like user experience, graphic design, user interface design, testing, content strategy, and so much more. It’s not only about learning PHP or CSS or JavaScript or C+.
As a computer science student, I’m sure that I will already be spending a lot of time figuring out how to use all these programming languages. My tests and exams are going to be practical-based – code this dashboard, build this inventory system and so on. No matter what happens, I will learn how to do all that (I promise, gulp!)
But I’m more interested in the well, softer, aspects of web design. These are the things only experience can get you and I’m chomping at the bit to learn. The best way would be to actually start doing it, I figure.
Seeking free web design clients for Milagro Interactive
There you go! I’ve laid my cards on the table. A newbie web developer looking to get her feet wet with building websites. And I’m looking for guinea pigs web design clients!
I hope that a few years down the road, I can look back at today and feel proud that I took the first steps to start Milagro Interactive 🙂
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