So You Want to Learn Website Development
So You Want to Become a Web Developer?
Have you ever thought of getting into the world of website development but wondered where to start? If so, you might have thought you face a few years at university with the burden of student finance weighing you down for ages. Well it doesn’t necessarily need to be so. There are resources out there for those that want to learn all aspects of website development and the good news is they don’t cost a fortune - some are even free! Read on to find out where to go for online learning.
Sitepoint has for many years been at the forefront of teaching website development. Originally they published text books then they branched out to running online tutorials. The sky really is the limit with the depth of their website development courses. There’s tutorials on everything from the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript but if you want to go further there’s courses such as Design / UX, programming in languages like Python, Ruby on Rails and PHP.
Sitepoint isn’t free, but it is low cost. Current prices are $6 monthly, but billed annually or if that’s too much outlay at once you can opt for the $9 monthly plan. For this you get access to all the courses you could want and their extensive library of print resources in the form of e-books.
W3Schools part of the World Wide Web Consortium have been running online tutorials for a very long time now. Again their courses start out like Sitepoint with the basics of web development but go in depth with courses on JQuery, C++, C#, ASP, MySQL and more.
W3Schools work on a freemium model. All the content is available for absolutely nothing. Yes, you read that right; it’s totally free to learn. However they do have a paid option where you get an ad-free experience and learn faster and it even has hosting for up to 15 websites included. Perhaps the best thing with W3Schools is that completing the courses leads to industry recognised certification.
The Open University has led the way in distance learning in the UK since the early 1970’s. They are now a great place to learn Web Technologies. The course covers website foundations, the interactive web and application development. At the end of this learning the assessment comes in the form of a project that applies the learning in each of these areas. Successful completion of the project leads to a Certificate of Web Technologies.
What are the pre-requisites? The course synopsis states that the modules do not teach programming themselves, but assume existing knowledge in these areas. So if you fancy taking on this course, you can always start with Sitepoint or W3Schools to attain that knowledge.