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Everyone has their own experiences, but from my view as a freelance web developer constantly working with new clients, I don't see much of this happening. All o
by gexla 14y ago
Everyone has their own experiences, but from my view as a freelance web developer constantly working with new clients, I don't see much of this happening. All of this depends on who you are working with though.
SEO: You don't need to know any more here than what you have needed to know in the past. Just make sure that you are sticking with your part of the basic webmaster guidelines.
Design in general: Nobody is going to ask a developer who can't design to do design work. That includes UI / UX design. That would be quite silly. Though the developer should probably be able to code the front-end plumbing in addition to the back-end.
HTML / CSS: You should know all of this, but back-end developers generally don't have to do most of the heavy lifting here. It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS and then the back-end devs can take it from there.
Build or join an open source project: There are a certain number of people who can benefit from this (you get paid for it by a company which benefits from the work or you are planning to offer paid support for your product) but I believe that projects outside of paid work should pull (or at least try) their own weight in paying for time that went into building that project. This could be money back or it could be utilities which make life easier for you.
Fast moving industry: Not really. Technology in general moves fast, but web development is painfully slow. Part of this has been browsers (and probably the standards groups) holding things back. We can't outrun the caboose.
Lots of people willing to take your job: Really? Where are they? We are supposedly competing on a global level (outsourcing) but I just don't see it. Even when I do have to compete with much lower cost developers, those developers are usually invisible and I never have to worry about them. I live in the Philippines and there is very little web development talent here (partially because all anyone cares about is sending texts.) I imagine much of the rest of the developing world is like that as well.
There are a lot of barriers to entry. Freelancing is difficult on the BUSINESS end, not the technical end. Good English and writing skills go a long way. Much of the technical side you can pick up quickly, but the really be functional enough to be worth much to a team requires a lot of time.
Most important is that you really only have to be good enough to stay a bit ahead of the masses. That's not hard.
One great way to nail all of this stuff is to build an app on the side and ship it. Monetize it, do the SEO, get traffic, etc. You will learn a lot from this process, and you will cover almost everything you need to know as a web developer. You might also make some money from it.
- bad_user 14y ago> It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS This is definitely true, however things are a little more complicated ... it's not the actual writing of the HTML/CSS that bugs me, but the fact that a PSD is static and often is not accompanied with guidelines on how it should be used. So for instance if the width of the design is 960px, what are you going to do? Keep it static while centering it on page? What background color should you use? (ever noticed that many designers simply forget about the background around the page?) And also, it's much better to make it dynamic, especially in this age of mobile browsers - so what should you resize? Should the side-bar also resize? By how much? Should it be capped at a max width? Should it fall at the bottom if the total width is too small? The big problem is that the dynamic parts should also be part of the design. I mean, sure, give me the PSDs because I can do a better job at writing clean and optimized HTML5 and I'm pretty efficient at it too, but I also want an HTML to see it live. It makes my work easier and also it shows me that you've thought about the dynamics at play, so I don't have to fill in.
- jammycakes 14y ago> HTML / CSS: You should know all of this, but back-end developers generally don't have to do most of the heavy lifting here. It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS and then the back-end devs can take it from there. In an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, you can often end up with HTML templates and CSS stylesheets that might fit the bill visually but simply aren't fit for purpose in other ways. As developers we need to consider factors such as the behaviour of the page and maintainability of the system as a whole. A badly designed stylesheet may be brittle and resistant to change or may even do things in a way that is incompatible with the frameworks and tools that you are using, and many designers aren't even aware that such constraints exist, let alone what problems they may cause. For example, I was once given a CSS stylesheet to work with (for which the client had paid quite a large sum of money) that declared <span> as a block-level element. This caused no end of chaos when we had to use it along with ASP.NET validator controls on a WebForms page, which of course makes liberal use of <span> tags for inline validation messages.
- porker 14y ago> It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS My experience has been the opposite. Why? Because understanding how the site's likely to evolve, which items are one-off HTML usage, which need to become generalised components and which CSS is going to be reapplied in similar but slightly different situations through the other X00 pages of the site requires insight and skill. You can blame the business for not providing a detailed enough spec to the HTML/CSS developer, but having tried providing loads of detail once, it just didn't work. Bad developer, bad spec - whatever, I do it myself now through necessity to deliver a good job, not through choice.