I get asked very often, “Is it easy to learn how to make websites?” I used to always answer that it’s easy and you can start making websites in a couple of months. But I answered based on my own experience, and I’m a couple of months of training have already made the first sites and got a job, and the training was given to me quite easily. But when I started teaching courses, my opinion changed dramatically. I realized that learning to make a site is very hard!
Why was this so?
The timing and difficulty of learning comes from many factors:
- Have you ever done programming before?
- What kind of mindset are you?
- How old are you?
- Do you even need it?
- And many other things…
Based on these conditions, some people learn faster, some slower. When I started making sites I already had experience in learning html at school and programming at university. Also, before starting to make websites, I freelanced for two years and drew logos, so some sense of design instilled in me. So, the initial conditions I had easier and so learning to develop was easy and who knows how dumb I would have been if I began to study from scratch. These are the factors I did not take into account when I was telling people that making sites is easy).
In the process of teaching lesson-web, I ran into people who were learning websites from scratch. They had never programmed, never opened photoshop, some didn’t even know how to create folders. It was hard for them and they learned everything in far more than a couple of months.
So there you go. I am now on record as saying: “Learning to make websites is hard! So hard that it’s better not to take it on!”
Let’s look at the details of why it is so hard
1) You will have to memorize a lot. This is not the worst thing, but still. Have to remember all the tags and css-properties. And also, the techniques for using those properties.
2) In site development, no matter how simple it would seem, there are many pitfalls. And if you want to become a pro, they need to know. And there are a lot of them. There are many nuances of using different css properties in different browsers, conflicts of tags and css properties, understanding how different tags and scripts work on different devices, and much more…and it’s very difficult to put them all into one general list, because they belong to different sections, and some, you might never use them at all. So you have to learn them in practice. And practice is time.
I’ve put together a general list of nuances that you’ll 100% encounter at first in a course on layout. So, with this point you will have an easier time.
3) Making a website is not about carrying boxes. You need to have a certain mind and character, you need perseverance, the ability to think logically, and since these are the sites, not the usual programming, and creative thinking. You have to have at least some “feel for design”.
It’s not always such a fun job where you write code with complete fun, sometimes it’s a tedious, painstaking work, and you have to accept and love it. And if you can’t love it, you have to be able to pull yourself together and do those tedious tasks through sheer force.
Speaking of which, that’s what I personally do. There are things that I hate to do, but I have to. For them, I carve out a certain time, gather my strength and quickly, quickly do it. But the amount of stuff I get high from, though, outweighs it, and that’s probably why I still haven’t given it up)
4) Unless you’re going to work in an office as a salaried worker, you have to learn the basics of marketing. You have to look for orders somewhere, don’t you? You’re going to have to learn how to find customers, talk to customers, and haggle. So if you are an introvert, and most programmers are introverts, you have to get out of your comfort zone and understand all this business stuff.
5) To follow up on the 4th point. If you “freelance”, you will probably have to become a full stack developer. This means that you will have to learn how to draw the design, layout design, put on cms, or connect some framework, to fill the site on the server, maintain the server, promote the site. In short, EVERYTHING! This is called a “turnkey” site.