Just thought I'd drop by and say hello, I'm Jamie, I live in Rotherham, England, and Web Design and Development has been a hobby, and big part of my life since 2001, when at the age of 12 I first started learning HTML and making my first basic websites in Microsoft Front Page!

 

Over the next few years I was just making basic websites for myself, and for fun, but since then I've known its what I wanted to do as a career.

 

When I went to college in 2005 I started learning more about Web Design and computing in general and started learning CSS and PHP with MySQL, and started using Dreamweaver for creating websites.

 

I've had a couple of jobs, but mainly in marketing, and not in just web design as I always wanted, my roles involved looking after company websites, but I never really turned my hobby into a career.

 

I've been 'out of touch' the last few years and I've only started to really catch up in the latest trends and technologies in the last 12 months, don't get me wrong, I've still been creating my own websites, but using everything I learnt before, I'd never heard of SEO, or responsive websites or most other modern stuff.

 

These days I use Photoshop for creating mockups and graphics, and I've recently started using Illustrator for creating Icons and logos, and I use Jet Brains PHP Storm for all my coding and development, and only in the past 6 months or so I've started creating all my websites 'mobile first' and responsive, it was a bit of a learning curve at first (Kinda like when I started creating CSS layouts and not tabular layouts!), but it is so much easier and it just comes naturally now.

 

I've also in the last 18 months learnt asp.net, my girlfriend is trained in asp.net and her own website was creating in the language, so I decided to learn it myself to help her with it.

 

After a couple of years of struggling to get a job with a Web Design agency I decided to try and start my own (http://www.greenfroginteractive.co.uk if anyone is interested) - I've had a few jobs so far, and I'm making enough to get by, but I still want to improve more, hence why I'm here!

 

I've been looking at a few web design websites and communities to join and hopefully post in, to build my skills more and to help others out, in this line of work you never stop learning and the technology is constantly evolving, and I don't want to make the same mistake of spending 5+ years out of the game again and not learning anything new!

Hi and welcome to the forums.

 

If you're looking to improve rapidly check out CodeSchool, and especially front-end masters if you want some more advanced stuff.

 

How is your JavaScript? That is all the rage these days and it's getting very big on the server side with Node.js. I'm sorry to say that ASP is a somewhat dying technology, there's still plenty of work in but if I were you i'd focus my efforts elsewhere.

 

Unlike a number of years ago the tech stack has now become so much more advanced and complex that it's next to impossible to master all areas of creating a website or app, of course if you are working solo you have to try your best to do all 3 (Design, Front-end and backend) but if you are wanting to get big projects it's best to specialise, or hire specialists in each area.

I spend a huge amount of time just in the front-end I could barely comprehend the time needed to do design and back-end to the same level.

It's a little easier (and perhaps a smart move) to combine front-end with backend by mastering JavaScript then you can write the same code everywhere.

 

https://www.codeschool.com/

http://www.frontendmasters.com/

Edited June 14, 201511 yr by rbrtsmith

Thanks, I'll check those out.

 

Javascript is something I'm really behind at, I have next to no experience in it, I've done a few very basic things (with a lot of help from google searches) but nothing else, but it is something I want to learn, especially jQuery.

 

asp.net isn't something I plan to do a lot of, I just learnt enough to get me by and to be able to help my girlfriend with her website, unfortunately due to health issues at the moment she hasn't been able to do as much work on it, so she asked me to do it, I personally prefer working in PHP, from the bits I've done in asp.net PHP seems so much easier.

Thanks, I'll check those out.

 

Javascript is something I'm really behind at, I have next to no experience in it, I've done a few very basic things (with a lot of help from google searches) but nothing else, but it is something I want to learn, especially jQuery.

 

asp.net isn't something I plan to do a lot of, I just learnt enough to get me by and to be able to help my girlfriend with her website, unfortunately due to health issues at the moment she hasn't been able to do as much work on it, so she asked me to do it, I personally prefer working in PHP, from the bits I've done in asp.net PHP seems so much easier.

 

Stick to php instead of ASP then. There's a lot to learn spend your time wisely learning the technologies that are in demand. Right now that is JavaScript, a huge amount of stuff is also still being built in PHP so getting stronger in that is also a good idea.

ASP is hosted generally on Microsoft servers and most hate working in this, and most servers are now unix based. There's work to be had in this but nothing like the scale of other technologies.

 

Codeschool has some fantastic JavaScript courses, don't fall into the trap of learning jQuery before JavaScript, jQuery is JavaScript, but a 'libray' that sits on top of it. it's not strictly a library but that's the easiest way to visualise it. There's a lot to learn granted but it's well worth it, the langage has and perceptions about it have changed a lot since when you last took up web development, many large scale apps are now built entirely in JavaScript, it's even finding it's way into Robotics.

Edited June 14, 201511 yr by rbrtsmith