Month: June 2011
June 26, 2011
Web Designers Roadmap
June 2011 – By: Stefan Mischook
PDF: web-designer-roadmap
The skills required in modern web design are constantly changing … that’s because the Web itself is always changing. If you want to be successful as either a web professional (web designer / programmer) or as web site owner, you have to keep up!
What to learn (as of 2011-2012) – in order of priority:
1. HTML
2. CSS
3. PHP basics
4. Javascript
5. JQuery
6. WordPress
7. OOP PHP (for programmers only)
8. HTML 5 and CSS 3
9. iPad / iPhone (choice of either: Objective C or HTML 5 + CSS 3)
Comments
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June 20, 2011
Every once in a while, something very big happens that affects the Web in general. Recently the iPad came out blowing away the market and effectively shutting down Flash by not allowing Flash to run on iPads.
… Yes, Flash is dying.
Unlimited Domain Names
The nerd powers that be, have just opened up the domain name market where any extension (suffix) is possible; no longer are we limited to .com, .net, .org etc … anything can go!!
That said, it ain’t cheap but it should still help put an end to the volture-like, blood sucking industry of after market domain names and cyber squatting losers, who can’t come up with anything more original than buying up a bunch of domain names, hoping to bilk someone in a resale.
From the article:
… people and companies will be able to set up a website with almost any address by the end of next year, if they have a legitimate claim to the domain name and can pay a hefty fee.
The Internet body that oversees domain names voted Monday to end restricting them to suffixes like .com or .gov and will receive applications for new names as of Jan. 12, with the first approvals likely by the end of 2012.
And they can be in any characters — Cyrillic, Kanji or Devanagari, for instance, for users of Russian, Japanese and Hindi.
Read more: New Domain Extensions
BTW, we have a new video course on how to build a CMS from scratch. Check it out!!
Stefan Mischook
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June 7, 2011
One of my main motivations is to teach you web design skills that are practical, marketable and in the end, will make you more money. We want to teach you how to make a living with those skills.
… Yes, web design for cash is a good thing – in fact, it’s the goal for many of us!
How to beat the competition:
Though the Web is growing faster than ever before, you still have a lot of competition out there when it comes to web design jobs. In fact, there are many more web designers today than ever before. Fortunately, we have a couple of big things going for us:
- The Web is many times bigger than it was in the 1990’s.
- Like the 1990’s, the key to getting ahead of the competition is not all that hard because (as always) we have one thing on our side: laziness! Yes, people are lazy.
The more you learn, the more you earn:
The key to getting ahead is found in learning. The more you know, the easier it will be to find work, to land that contract and to charge more for your time. It is important that you as a web professional continue to develop your skills and to look to what is coming around the bend – those who jump onto the next web technology trend, will be able to monetize that upside.
… Since most people are lazy and will only learn new techniques when they absolutely have to, all you need to do to get ahead, is to continue to the learn.
So, what are the web skills for today and tomorrow?
- HTML 5 and CSS 3.
- Tablets and smart phones: iPad, iPhone, Android.
- CMS development: WordPress, Drupal.
More later,
Stefan Mischook
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June 1, 2011
I am happy to announce yet another screencast tutorial for all you nerds out there: Build A Content Management System.
OK, not the most exciting title, but still an exciting course for those PHP nerds who want to go from PHP basics and get into building a full-fledged PHP application from scratch.
Learn how to build a content management system that provides a website all the tools needed to allow basic web users to manage the website content with ease. Over 6.5 hours of tutorials over 41 videos!
Here are some details about the video tutorial:
This course is aimed at intermediate level web developers, demonstrating how to build a basic PHP based content management system that uses object oriented programming techniques and implements the MVC pattern.
Along the way, I cover a wide range of technologies, including HTML and CSS, a bit of javascript/jQuery/AJAX and PHP/MySQLi. I also show how to integrate Colorbox (a jquery plugin) and TinyMCE (for the WYSIWYG functionality.)
Read more: Building a PHP based CMS
Check out the CMS course sample videos
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
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