Back in February I was laid off from my programming job at a well known defense company, who shall remain nameless, that I had been employed with for over ten years. Yeah, real nice. With two small children, a mortgage and a significant other who doesn't contribute very much I wasn't too happy. The only good to come out of it, is that I was able to branch out and learn web development. I was strictly a desk top application C/C++/Java developer. I had touched a little bit on web development, but not much. If I hadn't been laid off, I would still be doing the same old thing. Even though I really miss the money, I'm glad for the opportunity to learn new things.
Luckily, a local web development company hired me part-time, so I've been able to learn PHP. One of these days, I have to get around to re-coding my magazine back issues website. It is strictly HTML and CSS. I want to rework it with PHP. I also want to add an admin piece. When I add new magazine back issues to the site, I manually edit the HTML file. With an admin piece, I can just go to the admin directory on the site itself, login and type in the new issue information into a nice form and voila, the issue is added to the website. Really cool!!! I can do it from any computer, and I don't even need to edit the source code.
There's a lot to learn in the field of web development as there are so many web programming languages, tools and tricks: PHP, HTML5, CSS, Ruby, Ajax, JavaScript, Java, MySQL, MongoDB, Joomla, WordPress, WebGL, Dart, Node.js, etc. It's a field you never get bored in, which is what I like.
In addition to learning the web programming languages to build a website, you need to know something about search engine optimization (SEO). You don't want to go through the hard work of building a website and end up not having any visitors. A web site should have a keyword that is optimized for. Items, such as paragraphs, titles, meta descriptions, headers should use the keyword.
Few people realize the backend coding of a website should also be written using search engine optimization in mind. Website code should be free of errors. Sometimes PHP code will throw an error and the page will either stop loading leaving you with empty space, or it will continue loading, but display an ugly error box. If an error occurs, there are no keywords for a search engine to process, sections or the rest of the page may just be skipped. No keywords means no SEO, no search engine ranking, no visitors and no revenue.
You also have to watch out for spelling errors. Typos are pretty common, but can be costly in terms of SEO. Missing end tags on page sections can also cause problems for search engines.
If you have a website or are thinking of starting one, don't forget that search engine optimization and web development go hand in hand.
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