"I wanna learn how to code to build the next facebo--" stop ✋...right there. Let's rethink this.
Website Development, a world where we can build beautiful websites that catches the eyes of users. There's no limit to what you can do and learn, and that's where the field flourishes, but why should one become a website developer and what should we focus on?
Don't rush in thinking it's all rainbows 🌈 and butterflies 🦋
Coding sounds fun, but it's not always😐. I remember being stuck many times on just one simple feature on a website I was building and getting frustrated because I just couldn't get it right. At that point, I regretted even choosing the career path, but once I've found the problem and fixed it, I literally cried tears of joy. It's easy to lose passion in anything you were once passionate about, but with a really good resolve, you can stick to that path and do extremely well. It's safe to say, you need a good resolve to be a website developer or just any developer of that matter.
If you're on Instagram following programming meme pages or in Facebook coding groups, you're gonna see a lot of memes about debugging, and trust me, it's factual. Developers spend hours on projects writing lines and lines of codes and doing a bunch of research, and you'd often bump into bugs. And yeah...you'd lose your mind at times. But with great resolve, as I mentioned earlier, you'd find yourself not only solving these issues but sticking to the field and becoming an even better developer than you were.
Don't tell yourself you're just building 'websites'
Yes, I know, it's called Website Development because you're 'developing websites', but if you keep telling yourself that, that's exactly what you'll be doing; building bland, repetitive websites that have little or no meaning at all to the worldwide web. It's like some of those 'browsers' out there that NO ONE uses.
Instead, try to think of what you're building as a solution. Look for problems that currently exist in existing services or even build a website you think the world needs that haven't been built as yet. You're looking for problems and 'building' the solution. I've met with many new developers who think that the key to their success is building the next social media site like Facebook or Instagram. These are social media giants. It's not impossible, but it won't have much success unless your site has something the world needed that existing ones don't have. Still, it will take some time for people to completely trust your site, or even discover it. My advice: try to focus on things that are much more important to your community or businesses. In doing so, you can build your portfolio and clientele. This will keep you active as a website developer.
You want money 💵...but do you like what you do? 🤔
One of the reasons I see people getting into Website Development is because of how fast you can get a huge sum of money. Yes, you can put money as one of the reasons for choosing this field, but if you don't like what you do, it can become a burden.
I like to build everything from scratch. In doing so, I have full control of my website's design and functionality, and I can easily identify bugs whenever they pop up. But what I've noticed some people doing is downloading website templates and selling them to people. Call it fast money, but I call it fraud. Of course, you can use templates. It's completely fine, you won't be arrested, but you're sacrificing originality for cash. When the time arises for you to build a website that has no existing templates, will you still do it? If you were asked to build a website with special features that do not exist in current websites, will you take up the challenge, or bow out?
Website Development is a wide field and they're many challenges ahead of you if you've chosen this path. Do you have the resolve to take on these challenges? Do you have the drive to see through every project to the end? Yes? Then welcome to the Web Development Community. 😊