sweet 17

[velious]

As you prolly guessed from the title, I am 17. I am seriously working on HTML, CSS, and I just now started learning XML. I'll be in college next year and I would like to hear from those in the field, what you do on any given day, and atvantages and disatvantages of the job. I want to be self employed, but I feel like I dont know enought to really go on from here. If you know of any sites or anything...please tell me..thanks.. :)

[Ben@WEBProp]

Well, although I have little personal experience, I know quite a few people who are self employed. They say that it is a great system of making money as long as you love what you do, and you are a hard worker. The more you work and the better that you are, the more you can make. Your earnings should end up being a direct relationship between your skills and motivation. As for Web Programming, it is fun, and although it can be a bit unnerving sometimes, i like it. You said you are going to college, right? Well then, what a great opportunity! I am a freshman in college right now, and the college life is great. You shouldn't get too obsessed with the whole making money thing though. I mean, there is alot more to college than just acedemics and work.

So what you should try to do is to make enough money, not a ton more, just enough to buy condoms and beer....i mean... books and supplies. However, you also cant get too distracted by the college life. Your priorities should be:

1) Acedemics
2) Making the minimum to survive
3) College life
4) making extra money

You will have to find your own personal balance, but with time it should be easy to find. Good luck with it, and I hope you have fun. Oh ya, one final peice of advice: although a girlfreind is nice to have in college, they are way hella expensive and time consuming when you are just starting out. But don't worry, you can still get some "TLC" without being emotionally attached. So far I have found that most of the college girls are pretty lonely and want a make-out buddy. I'm not saying they're all nymphos, but you get my drift.

Alright, that's about all I can spit out for now.

-Ben

[velious]

hey Ben
would it be worth my time to learn a language like JS (javascript), php or something like that or should I learn a web design tool like dream weaver, go live, or front page?...

[Ben@WEBProp]

Well, I'm not sure about getting Front Page, i mean 2003 is supposed to be good, but if its anything like 2000, then I wouldnt recommend it anymore. The only great thing about FrontPage that i can see (as I use it soley for this purpose) is to generate CGI webbots for form validation and form sending. Its a huge language from what I can tell, but FrontPage just does it for you after you give it some details.

Anyway, I hear dreamweaver is great, but I have never used it, so I can't give the best opinion on it. But how I learned HTML and the like was mainly from trying stuff in the main wysiwyg window of Front Page, and then looking at the HTML tag view. You definatly need to know HTML, CSS, and you should probably start getting on the XHTML/XML Bandwagon once you have a little experience under your belt. In college (or in high school, if you can) take a graphic arts or class that shows you how to create and design cool computer graphics. That will help. PHP totally rocks the boat, or so I've heard, so it wouldnt hurt to learn it, but it's not neccessary. As for JS, it would be a good thing to learn it, but right now I am at the point to where I can ussually see what is going on in the code for editable bits and peices, and if I need to edit more than that I just post on the JS boards at coding forums.

Hope that helps!

-Ben

[oracleguy]

You should most definetly learn a server side language like PHP or ASP. And javascript can't hurt either. Anything big you are going to do is going to require knowing a server side language and most likely working with a database.

Personally, if you are wanting to be a professional web developer, you are going to be coding by hand and not using a program like dreamweaver.

Especially once you start building pages with lots of server side code.

So you want to know the advantages and disadvantages of being a professional web developer?

Well let's start with advantages, if you really enjoy programming and stuff, it is fun to do. Especially if you work for large company where you can get any development tools you need. You also can get to do some really cool things, I mean I kinda get a thrill out of developing some web app and knowing people are going to be using it around the world for several years to do important stuff.

Disadvantages, well... meetings, meetings, conference calls, a gazillion emails.... lol.... oh and sometimes the people in charge don't know how the thing works they just want it to do something, not always but sometimes and when it happens it can be somewhat fustrating.

Learn to code modularly, it helps compensate for indecivness. Like the project I'm working on now, we are on the third layout and it is looking like we'll have at least a 4th before we bring it online. The job of design the template and stuff after the artist got done was mine and I didn't make too modular, luckily I made the layout CSS based and we've gotten A LOT of mileage out of that. We'll after the second design change, I made it more modular and stuff and it helps a lot. And our project has over 700 pages on it right now. Thank goodness for TCL scripting and regular expressions.

[shlagish]

I would say defenitly learn CSS and javascript is good too.

CSS: VERY GOOD TO SAVE TIME. Like what oracleguy was talking about. With 700 pages, if you want to change ALL the text to bright red, you only have you change it ONCE (In html, you have to change it 700 times!!)
CSS also allows stuff that HTML doesn't.
Javascript, well, I'd say you would have to learn at least one script language (not necessarily js) because they do very usefull stuff. For example, if you site is selling something and your offering to calculate tax for the user (so he doesn't have to do it), you could make javascript calculate it. Anyways, I don't have the best examples but I know it's usefull.

btw, I'm NOT a professionnal web designer. Far from it! I'm just this unknown guy who does it for fun, what a nerd! But oh well, hope what I said could help you anyways.