Web design is a skill that you can learn over the course of a few months, but those who pursue it throughout their careers stand to gain the most from it. New trends in design separate armchair designers from true web developers. Both can form adequate careers, but a true developer understands the solid principles of good web design.
Try New Projects
Buying a new book on programming or reading more tutorials can help someone learn a language, but for serious and specialized projects, you’re going to want to turn to professional developers who have been vetted. Expert Python programmers can actually help to council clients and guide them toward making smart tech decisions when dealing with Python software.
Writing a small application that keeps track of your email addresses or appointments will teach you more about a programming language than any tutorial you can follow on the web. These self-motivating projects are often short bursts of creativity that you can take to forums for evaluation. Becoming an Python programmer requires you to have experience building apps, but without feedback from other users your knack for interface design would never improve.
Write More Code
Using the language frequently is the best way to master the ins and outs of it. Research new coding libraries and implement existing trends on your own website. Javascript has become a popular tool for designers that work with portfolio websites, so look at the tricks they use and implement them on your own pages.
Create something useful to you, and then work on perfecting it. A good developer understands that there are no first draft miracles, the product improves with each iteration. Keep track of bugs you find, go back and debug the program and make it better.
Choose projects that challenge you as a developer, drawing on skills you know while forcing you to research new skills for the final implementation. If you are trying to optimize your website for SEO, try working on the more technical aspects first. If web development is your specialty, improve content first.
Enroll in Tutorials
Code Academy is just one of many online schools that provide canned “challenges” that you can complete to test your mettle. Some tutorials even come with certification, which can help identify you as an expert on the language you are working with and ultimately help you secure more work.
You can also try and contribute to an Open Source project that you like, or study its documentation to see what improvements you can make for your own software.
Study
New improvements are constantly added to code libraries. The “video” tag changed how HTML interprets video and makes that medium now indexable for search engines. This is a huge change that has far reaching implications in the world of optimization. You could be taking advantage of cutting edge techniques like meta data, social APIs and graphics trends that would improve your site and your skills.
Talk with Experts
Find a list of developers on Twitter to follow, or get on some mailing lists. Stack exchange and hacker news are also good places to find users that have resources readily available for you to use. You might find suggestions on new code snippets to use, or how to troubleshoot an issue you’re having.
It’s easy to get discouraged when your project doesn’t work. That’s the last part of moving past amateur status. Accepting failure is tough, but inevitable. Not every application you write will work flawlessly. Continuing your work in the face of that failure is the only way to improve.
[Photograph by Stuart Pilbrow]