Hey there! My name is Lucas, and I’m a Brazilian Computer Science student who’s interested in earning money with web development (who isn’t on this forum?). Currently I’m doing “The Web Developer Bootcamp” course at Udemy, and I must say that it’s been quite an informative course so far. My issue is that I feel like I’m going through the course too fast, and that when I finish it I won’t have a clue on where to go from there. To remedy that I bought a bunch of courses on Udemy related to web development (there was a sale), which include a JavaScript course, a Git course, 50h+ of content about Java, a React course and a Photoshop course for freelancers, since I know nothing about the design side of things.
I came to this website looking for advice. Am I doing things efficiently? How long should I expect before I can start earning money developing websites? (That college tuition doesn’t pay by itself!) What can I do to learn more, and what else should I be looking into? I know that this is a lot to ask, but the constant self-doubt gets to me sometimes.
I want to be able to plan a roadmap for my career, with goals to be achieved in certain amounts of time. For example, I want to make a website for a friend of mine, so right now that’s one of my goals as I learn more about web development. Another goal of mine is to develop a web crawler (spider? Scraper?) that locates small businesses on sites like Manta and Tradesi that lack websites, or that have websites but that lack in content, so that I could get in touch with their owners and offer to do some pro-bono work to kickstart my career, but I don’t know how long it’d take for me to learn how to do that.
I have a cousin who does Front End development for a living, and he has said that he’d support me once I learned enough to make professional websites, so I’m really living and breathing this stuff right now so that I can get there quickly.
Any input is appreciated, thank you for your attention, and have a good day/evening!
You don’t need real clients before you can start making “pro level” websites. Just start now and start practicing.
Imagine a hypothetical client/business (say, a lawyer’s office, a small electronics shop, a small realtor office, etc)… now design a website/look for it, using photoshop or some other UI program… and based on that “approved design”, try to code the necessary HTML/CSS code to create that look/finished product.
Once you have an actual working html/css code, then you can push it further by adding some meat and bones to it. Populate the page content from a database. Populate the photos from a database. Add online forms to search the database. Add google mapping, etc.
I see, that makes a lot of sense. I really should begin making some of those projects to improve my skills. I still worry about how long it’ll take me to get to a level where I can actually make promises to clients and deliver them, though.
Honestly, I have plenty of time, it’s just that I’m an impatient person.
Once you learn how to connect your website to a database and do crud operations (create, read, update, delete) the kind of websites you can do for clients just expands.
So this means choosing a backend database platform (either Sql, MySQL, mongodb. Etc) and learning its sql commands or api so you can manipulate the database and generate all kinds of reports the customer/client may need.
For design I’d recommend the books 100 things every designer should know about people and don’ make me think, both are focussed con web interfaces, also theres a course in human center design in coursera, it’s free ando worth! Also the basics from node could be usefull, if you will focus con freelancing PHP might be better to work with WordPress sites (deliver fast!)