Hey guys,

 

I'm a college student who is in desparate need of some extra cash.

I know HTML and CSS and I'm pretty familiar/willing to learn with the adobe programs. I like illustrator and photoshop the most. I hand code my websites.

 

I am really into interaction design and templates. However I don't know a lot of of dynamics of web design (PHP, javascript and such)..

 

Can anybody help me find a good path to take to try and earn a little income on the side?

 

Thanks,

Kevin

If your looking for some tutorials on WordPress and theme development in general I have recently added a post to my blog below which talks about theme development for WordPress, it could be useful. Another great resource is TreeHouse - it teaches you a lot that you will need to get started, but since your after a little extra income this might not be the best option.

It might be a good idea to spend your time coming up with a wireframe and then a design of the template you would like to create and then make it into an HTML template, which could be posted up on themeforest. Then over time convert that base html theme into a WordPress, Drupal or Joomla theme (whichever CMS you wish to focus on).

 

Good luck

Thanks for the recommendation. That's the second time I've heard of 'TreeHouse'... I'll have to check it out. Is it similar to Lynda.com?

What exactly do you mean by wireframe?

In your experience, which CMS has the easiest learning curve?

Thanks again.

TreeHouse in my opinion is better than Lynda.com. Lynda tries to be all things to all people and it does a good job at that, but Treehouse is focused 100% on web design / dev and as a result it's more suited to the kind of things you want to learn -- based on your post.

 

I'd say CodeSchool and FrontEndMasters are better for JavaScript, and more advanced topics, but TreeHouse has some of the besrt PHP and WordPress tutorials on the web.

Thanks for the recommendation. That's the second time I've heard of 'TreeHouse'... I'll have to check it out. Is it similar to Lynda.com?

What exactly do you mean by wireframe?

In your experience, which CMS has the easiest learning curve?

Thanks again.

 

I'm not sure if WordPress necessarily has the easiest learning curve, it's not a difficult learning curve but there is a lot of depth once you get down into all the functionality. The reason I would recommend it though is that it has a huge audience and your goal is to make extra money from templates, which is why WordPress is a great choice as it gives you a larger audience to sell your plugins/themes.

 

Good luck

I don't feel like wordpress is all too difficult. My advice is to built your site like any other, then reverse engineer the wordpress workings into it. You'll quickly be able to take sections of code from the wordpress codex and figure it out.

 

When you're good enough, you can build sites without having to add in the CMS parts at the end, and instead do it as you go.