Any web designers/ developers out there? I'm looking for career advice...

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As I'm a one forum at a time kind of guy I'm finding myself starting more and more off topic threads on here... Sorry about that.

So I was forced to quit my boring menial minimum wage job, it's a short but very boring story. It sucks to be unemployed but I'm trying to make the best of it and I hated that job anyway. I'm lucky enough to have no commitments or responsibilities at all right now, and I have just barely enough cash in the bank to stop me from starving for a few months.

I've had some aspirations of getting into the whole web field for a little while now but I haven't really been able to make much progress towards getting there aside from putting together one or two very basic sites for family friends and following the occasional online tutorial. Now I finally have no excuses for not being proactive about all this but I'm finding it all a bit daunting.

I reckon I've got about 3 months before the money runs out and I'll need to look at taking a job as similarly uninspiring as my last. If I dedicate myself to it I want to be in a position to optimistically apply for junior/ entry level web design positions. Is it too ambitious of me to even think I can teach myself everything?

What technologies should I be prioritising? Javascript/ jQuery? Getting to grips with the workings of Drupal or Wordpress? Server side stuff? The visual design aspects?

Any recommended online courses? I'm currently using tutsplus mostly although I have used lynda.com in the past.

This post contains a lot of questions I'm not sure anyone will be able to help me with, but as this is nerd fitness there must be a few of you working in this kind of area.

Thanks, James.

[joeyb]

I'm always leery of learning a framework, specifically for one job. The problem is that the frameworks, for the most part, will come and go. Languages will come and go too, but a lot less often and the principles of the languages are usually transferable to another language. If you know the language, you can pretty easily pick up on most frameworks too.

If I were in your position, I'd focus on learning javascript and php. Javascript is really starting to become a big thing as client-side applications take over and php is a pretty popular language with a lot of support online. Python and Ruby are other options if you don't want to go with php.

After that, if you want to get into a specific market, then you can shoot for learning a framework like Drupal or Wordpress. At that point, I'd probably look at job postings and see which frameworks are listed the most for the type of jobs you are looking at to figure out what you should be learning.

[Shortkaik]

joeyb has great advice. I agree that JavaScript is good for learning as well as being a popular language you'll see as a job requirement if you go into this field.

If you decide to learn PHP, you might want to take on something like Wordpress as sort of a "side project" - it's based in PHP, so if you futz around with it while you're learning PHP, it might give you a bit more practical experience as well. Build some plugins, modify a theme. But make sure your focus is on concepts, principles and languages rather than one specific platform.

Check out the courses on iTunes U. You can find some full-term college/university level courses there that will might be of use for you, all for free!

[joeyb]

joeyb has great advice. I agree that JavaScript is good for learning as well as being a popular language you'll see as a job requirement if you go into this field.

If you decide to learn PHP, you might want to take on something like Wordpress as sort of a "side project" - it's based in PHP, so if you futz around with it while you're learning PHP, it might give you a bit more practical experience as well. Build some plugins, modify a theme. But make sure your focus is on concepts, principles and languages rather than one specific platform.

Check out the courses on iTunes U. You can find some full-term college/university level courses there that will might be of use for you, all for free!

That's a good point. I taught myself to program in php in high school by coming up with a small project to work on and looking up how to do things as I needed. It's a lot easier (at least for me) to learn something when I can apply it to a specific situation than trying to learn all of the language in theory.

[dshale]

I am currently working on a web app at work. We are using several different technologies for the app: PHP, Apache, Percona, Mongodb, nodejs, redis, nginx, memcache, kohana framework, etc. You'll find that everything has certain advantages and disadvantages and it comes down to what is needed and the best way to do it. Dealing with some things can be a pain, and some technologies are really good but are in their infancy and don't have the capabilities are some more established languages. If any piece of advice I could give is learn the fundamentals of programming and figure out what you are good at. It could be system level stuff, you might end up wanting to be a DBA, It could be more server side technologies, you might have an eye for art and design and be good designing the user experience.

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Thanks for the replies. I'm going to knuckle down with some javascript tutorials this afternoon and see how that goes. Thanks for the iTunes U recommendation too, I totally forgot about that service.

I'm curious to know how many of you working professionally in the web industry are self taught as opposed to university educated in a related subject?

I have a BSc in an almost entirely unrelated subject that makes returning to studying in the UK prohibitively expensive, but I've considered taking out private loans to fund it. Though that would probably put far too much pressure on me to find instant and well paid employment immediately on graduation which is probably too much of a risk with the job market as it is.

[joeyb]

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to knuckle down with some javascript tutorials this afternoon and see how that goes. Thanks for the iTunes U recommendation too, I totally forgot about that service.

I'm curious to know how many of you working professionally in the web industry are self taught as opposed to university educated in a related subject?

I have a BSc in an almost entirely unrelated subject that makes returning to studying in the UK prohibitively expensive, but I've considered taking out private loans to fund it. Though that would probably put far too much pressure on me to find instant and well paid employment immediately on graduation which is probably too much of a risk with the job market as it is.

I taught myself CS101 basically, but went to school for everything else. There is a lot of theoretical stuff that they teach you that you apply when you are working that you wouldn't have known without it. For example, my understanding of regular expressions went through the roof once we did the automata. I understood what they did before and could put together a pretty basic one, but now I'm a reg ex master.

[Shortkaik]

I learned a lot on my own when I was a teenager (back when I had free time), and was getting some pocket money form designing small local websites - I was doing pretty basic HTML, CSS, and some work with Flash at the time (remember when every website had a Flash splash page?)

But then I continued on and got my Bachelor's in Computer Science, and worked in web development as a co-op student throughout. Now I'm doing less web and more desktop development.

[dshale]

I have a BS in computer science. I think you could self study. MIT has free online course material @ http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm