Having been in IT management, I've decided that this realm is not for me, and have made a conscious decision to divert my career into Web development\design.

I am familiar with html and css (older versions), but am clearly very out of touch. Without taxing people to much, and asking a familiar questions, what would be the advice for somebody like me? I'm tech savvy having been in IT for many years,  but am a little lost regards the types of roles that I see now, there appears to be a lot of crossover between design and development? 

I'm using my own website as my learning tool, html and css, and really want to get to grips with those languages before considering JS, but wondered if there were any clear career paths I could pencil in, just as a guide..

Always a difficult one to answer.

The days of building small sites from scratch are very much over. If you are big company you may want your own platform (eg: Amazon or eBay) but your clients are not going to pay for a hand made site when they can get something from GoDaddy for next to nothing.

And then there is WordPress which now drives over 30% of all websites, is free, well supported and has thousands of free themes and plugins you can install.

If you still want to code then look at building your own plugins and themes. There is a huge market for such products and if you find a niche you can earn decent money (it pays my bills).

Or you could offer support to existing websites fixing problems and providing maintenance.

Or you could learn how to rank and market websites (SEO for example).

Or build specialist applications for industry.

Or mobile apps.

A whole world of opportunities are out there.

Yes the web dev field is very broad nowadays, in the old days a "webmaster" would do everything but now roles have divided into logical roles such as:

• Back end developer (programming, databases)
• Front end developer (what the public sees, i.e. web pages, sites, Content Management Systems)
• UX/UI designer (how the site looks, feels and works)
• Marketing/SEO (getting the site noticed)

And even then some roles have specialist areas, e.g. some back end people only do certain aspects such as database design.

Ask youself what particular area interests you.

21 hours ago, BlueDreamer said:

Yes the web dev field is very broad nowadays, in the old days a "webmaster" would do everything but now roles have divided into logical roles such as:

• Back end developer (programming, databases)
• Front end developer (what the public sees, i.e. web pages, sites, Content Management Systems)
• UX/UI designer (how the site looks, feels and works)
• Marketing/SEO (getting the site noticed)

And even then some roles have specialist areas, e.g. some back end people only do certain aspects such as database design.

Ask youself what particular area interests you.

and copywriting  (could come under marketing but thought i'd mention it) 

 

2 hours ago, davep said:

and copywriting  (could come under marketing but thought i'd mention it)

haha yes good catch - there are probably a dozen more things that could be added!

Yeah what the others have said, there's also full-stack developer.  Quite common in the JavaScript/TypeScript world as it's the same language on the server as the frontend so there's less context switching.  It's quite a tall order to be proficient in both the front and backend even if it's the same language.

Most full stack developers that I know of started in the front-end or backend and gradually transitioned over years from working in the industry.