The career you choose can affect your life in a lot of ways. Aside from influencing your financial stability, your career can also make or break your professional and personal growth. Working in a company that allows you to enhance your skills by commissioning training and workshops, for example, will help you climb the corporate ladder and learn new skills at the same time
If you currently have a career but see yourself unhappy in it, consider taking up a web development degree and switch to another career. A web development career is in high demand, improves your earning potential, and allows you to either work full-time or as a freelancer.
Start With A Web Development Degree
Before you can enjoy the benefits of a web development career, you need to learn web development first. Depending on your skills and availability, you can pursue a web development degree through online schools, online tutorials, or coding boot camps. If your schedule allows it, you can also enroll in a brick and mortar school and learn from a traditional classroom setup.
These learning platforms will require time, effort, and costs. If you have zero background on web development, learning from scratch can be more taxing. But, all of the resources you expend in pursuing a web development degree will be worth it as you’ll learn the following:
1) Use Programming Languages
As the name suggests, programming languages are a set of grammatical rules and vocabulary used to command a computing device or computer to execute specific tasks. Just like how human beings use words to communicate with each other, web developers utilize these programming languages to communicate with a computer.
Learning how to use programming languages are essential for a web developer in order to showcase his/her skills. Your performance and credibility as a web developer will be assessed based on your ability to use programming languages.
When building a career as a web developer, make sure that you master the following programming languages:
- HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is one of the most common programming languages every aspiring web developer should know. You can think of HTML as the code that defines which part of a web page is a header or footer, and where multimedia such as images and videos are placed.
HTML serves as the basic programming language, which means that learning it first will make it easy for you to understand and integrate more complicated programming languages.
- CSS: Cascading Style Sheets function as the sister language of HTML. Once all of the parts of a webpage are defined with HTML, it’s now time to implement CSS codes.
This programming language allows you to select layouts, fonts, and colors for a specific webpage. Without CSS, a web page will look dull and uninteresting.
To paint a clearer picture of how these two programming languages work with each other, consider this analogy: HTML functions as the foundation of a house while CSS is responsible for giving the house its interior and exterior designs.
- Javascript: Web pages aren’t only built to provide information or please the user with colors and patterns; these online platforms are also created to provide content that’s both dynamic and functional for the users.
Having sufficient knowledge and practice on javascript allows you to incorporate additional features to a web page that can include animated graphics, photo slideshows, and forms that provide autocomplete suggestions.
2) Basics Of WordPress
The advent of technology has influenced the birth of different online platforms. However, only a few of these platforms continue to be in existence – and one of these is WordPress. Since 2003, WordPress has been the most preferred blogging and open source web development platform.
Pursuing a web development degree is an excellent avenue for you to learn techniques on how to maximize the features of WordPress. This information is essential because WordPress currently supports more than half of the websites on the World Wide Web. Manipulating websites will become a much easier task if you know how to use WordPress.
3) Understand How UI And UX Work
When creating a powerful website, its user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) should always be considered. By learning the fundamentals of those areas, you’ll know how to add and improve certain features that users usually look for in a website.
User interface and user experience help you create a website that provides functionality and ease of use. Along with programming languages, understanding how these two work together can help you satisfy your clients’ needs without wasting a lot of money on the website.
4) Know About SEO
Search Engine Optimization involves the improvement of a website’s rankings in order to land on the first Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of different search engines like Google and Yahoo. A website that has the best SEO practices will appear on top of the SERPs whenever a user searches for related keywords online.
For aspiring web developers, the idea of learning SEO might not seem ideal. You might think that your role as a web developer doesn’t cover what specific content should be posted on a website — this is a misconception.
The quality and quantity of content posted are crucial for the rankings of a website and web developers play a huge part in this process. Your skills as a web developer are necessary in SEO because search engine algorithms also look after the actual structure and codes used in the website.
Heading tags or HTML, for example, are essential for SEO. Search engines will check a website’s heading tags or HTML to check if this online platform provides accurate and well-supported information.
Websites that publish high-quality information are rewarded with better online rankings.
Start Now
If you think a career in web development is suitable for your interests and long-term goals, start planning on how you can pursue a web development career as early as now. Having the said educational background will increase your chances of landing a job and help you achieve one flourishing career in your chosen industry.
The earlier you start on pursuing a web development degree, the sooner you can create a career from and succeed in it!