Hey everybody, Mike Linville here of Black Do Education with this week's
installment of Office Hours where we answer your questions about web design, web development,
and online marketing. This week's question comes from Jaydee via Facebook and the question
goes a little something like, "I can't seem to cross the HTML gap into PHP I'm used to
hand coding HTML and CSS layouts in Coda which is just a graphical editor for those of you
who don't know I need the functionality of PHP WordPress etc. how can a crossover easily?
Now we questions like that all the time, how do I do this, how do I learn to be a developer,
how do I do what you do, those types of things and those are all fine those are all great.
The one thing that really stuck out about this question though was the last part of
the sentence that says, "how can I crossover easily". You can't. Jaydee, I'm talking to
you buddy. You can't do it easily if it was easy everybody would do it right if you do
the same thing that everybody does you're going to get the same thing that everybody
gets and right now there are a whole lot of really crappy web developers out there and
you don't want to be one of those guys. You want to be able to rise up above. So when
I'm taking a look at this question, there's really two ways we can go about answering
it. The first way is just to take a look practically at how do I solve the problem right now right
and the question really related to how do I customize a WordPress theme. How do I integrate
HTML and graphics into WordPress theme which is really just a series of PHP files or we
could take a step back and really kind of get to more of the core feature the court
challenge we have here and that's, how do learn PHP so that I can become a more well-rounded
developer. It's kind of like that old saying, give a man a fish he'll eat for a day. Teach
a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime. There is no easy way around it, you have to
study okay we are always studying. 14 years ago when I got started this was the first
book I read read. It's about 900 pages I read it from cover to cover like it was a textbook.
I taught myself how to program Perl. We don't really use a lot of Perl anymore but it was
a very effective way to get me into web development and transitioned into PHP into JavaScript,
MySQL and all the other stuff the interesting thing is we've been doing this for 14 years
and a lot of people are like, man you've finally made it. And I'm like no. I'm studying more
now than I ever have. Because now I understand now that my value is dependent upon what I've
got in my head how I can serve my customers. If they just want someone to come take a logo
and put on their existing template, they can go find that. They can go get someone on oDesk
and they can pay somebody in India 6 dollars an hour to do that. That's not what I bring
to the table. So Jaydee, if you like Web development and you want to make this career my suggestion
to you my impassioned plea to you is to do the work now don't get lazy and do the footwork
now study get books go to seminars, find what people are doing online and really really
make it your passion. You really want to make sure that you focus on the study of doing
the work properly if you're into web development a couple of things we started out with and
that we still use to this day I want to let you know, number one O'Reilly books like O'Reilly
books technical books: Perl, PHP, Apache, these are great you can always tell O'Reilly
books do they usually have a little animals on the front. They are fantastic technical
books I highly recommend this always be reading another resource online resource is a place
called codeAcademy.com CODE Academy.com online coding tutorials basically take you from the
very beginning like this is my name all the way through a series of lessons that will
actually help you out. And then the third online resource that I really want to tell
you about is, this is a great one. This is one that I actively subscribe to today, and
all of my designers and developers love it. It's called TeamTreehouse.com. It's a fantastic
resource, they've got a huge team over there now and they're always putting together more
stuff together about HTML 5, programming, iOS development, and stuff like that, it's
a fantastic tool and I highly recommend it. Now as a web developer or really anything
else in the market you value or what you can charge what you can expect to get paid on
an open market is really dependent upon the value that you bring to the table right. What
you bring to the market place. So for example, I'm a web developer and someone comes to me
to talk about web design that's great but they're not really talking about just a design
right in order to be able to effectively give somebody an estimated to create a website
that's going to serve their business I need understand marketing and understand their
target market and understand design and development to get it done and we can't get the solution
we want out of a prepackaged solution like WordPress or Joomla I need to build custom
programming custom PHP or .net code that will do what we need it to do. As a web developer
if you've only got one thing in your toolbox that means you're limited right? That means
the client has to turn around and go to other people to try and fill those other positions.
If you're okay with that that's fine because that happens all the time that's like the
status quo it seems like. Now the problem with that kind of philosophy is that those
projects they typically lose focus right and you know you go into a project with a certain
mission and certain messages you want to get out there by the time you get that passed
to three or four different teams it usually loses some of its focus those types of projects
always take longer. I'm not even going to say almost always, those things always take
longer and you know they're typically more expensive okay so I hope that you understand
that by watching this video this isn't just about Jaydee, this is not just about web development
this really is all about how do you position yourself in the market and make yourself a
valued commodity when everybody else is worrying about price if you're talking to people about
price and you're competing on price you haven't made yourself valuable enough okay. Alright,
that's all we have today I want to say thank you for your time this is Mike Linville from
Black Dog Education and you know if you like this video make sure that you like it, share
with your friends pass it around to whomever and if you have questions you'd like to have
answered make sure that you come by our Facebook page it's just Facebook.com/BlackDogEducation
post your questions and we'll try to answer those in this type of a format. Again this
is Mike Linville, we'll see you next time!}