8 Weeks to Become an Entry Level Web Designer and Web Developer?

This post is in place of Week 6 post.

For anyone who has been following my website, you should know by now that web design and web development are complicated and challenging. But at the same time, it is showing up more and more on the news and blogs, and there are programs dedicated to learning programming, such as Dev Bootcamp, Flatiron School, Code Fellows, Hacker School, and others. Unfortunately, many of these programs are still very expensive, require relocation, and just simply not practical to many people.

Regardless, these programs and my website should give more than enough evidences and reasons that you need to learn coding. So, this post is a suggestion about how you may become an entry level web designer and web developer within 8 weeks.

The term “entry-level” should be taken cautiously, and you are responsible for any success or failure from this suggestion.

Why Is This Different?

First of all, the suggestion I am making here will be much cheaper, and you will NOT have to relocate. I’ve been trying and reading about multiple sources about becoming web designer and web developer, and I thought it would be helpful to others, who may want to do the same.

Furthermore, in couple of decades or earlier, many job descriptions will require basic coding as a job description along with other skills like basic Word/Excel and friendly personality. Coding is important not just because everyone says it is, but really, because everything is becoming computerized.

For this 8-week suggestion, you can just spend roughly $75/month to acquire necessary skills to be an entry level web designer and web developer.

How Is It Possible in $75/month?

Honestly, that’s only from looking at the actual monetary fees. There are far larger costs that you need to dedicate, and that’s time. In fact, hours and hours, days and days, and literally, you must be ready to breathe coding to even have an attempt at an entry level web designer and web developer.

$75/month breakdown is like this:

$25/month for Lynda.com
$50/month for Adobe Creative Cloud
$0/month for Codecademy

What Are These Recommendations?

Let me walk through each one. First of all, Lynda.com is a well-known website for tutorials by experts, and more than anything, I’ve heard and read good things about this website for Adobe products. Until recently, Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and others were more of special programs that only professionals and serious hobbyists used. A part of the reason was its insanely high cost, even if you were a student. But with Adobe Creative Cloud, you can pay $50/monthly to get access most of the popular Adobe products.

Of those products, I really recommend that you pick three – Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign – and become skilled at them with Lynda.com tutorials. It’s not that I’m against other products like After Effects, Dreamweaver, or Flash, but simply, the three programs I mentioned are used so often in general usages that learning them is essential for anyone who wants to do a project in web designing.

Now, I have mentioned Codecademy before in this website, and as a matter of fact, I’ve gone through this program a bit before I switched off to Ruby on Rails and then went to some more actual books on HTML/CSS. Okay, getting back to the main point here, Codecademy is an excellent starting point. I don’t dare say that it is anything close to what you can learn as a true programmer, but its user interface has improved over time, and it does offer quite a lot of good languages to learn.

From Codecademy, I recommend you to learn HTML/CSS/Javascript in the first 4 weeks along with Adobe Creative Cloud’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. As you can guess, that’s a lot to achieve in 4 weeks. But, if you consider how other people do it at expensive programming bootcamps, this is probably not much different only that some of time here is focused more on Adobe products. For the remaining 4 weeks, I recommend people to pick up jQuery and do their first projects with Javascript while they spend time with more server-sided languages, such as Python and Ruby, and do API developments. If you go through all of these, then you ought to be in a good shape to start making something on your own. It won’t be next Facebook or Twitter, but still, it will be something you can call yours and run on the web.

Jobs After 8 Weeks?

I think this is probably the biggest difference from other programming bootcamps. For my 8-week suggestion, you are not going to land a job. In fact, even if you got 100% in every track from Codecademy and mastered Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, no one will be willing to hire you on the spot. Anyone who will try to tell you that is out of the mind.

Instead, you should continue with your job but try to explore roles using your technical knowledge. For instance, let’s say you are currently in a marketing firm and going door-to-door sales for telecommunication product. After doing this intensive 8-week suggestion, you can maybe come up with a web app to better track your sales performances. Once you get that running, you can take that to your employer and see what he/she thinks. If it’s good and stable, you can try to ask for the company to give you more time to work on it – and there you go, you are now working on your first coding project.

Because there are still some beliefs that proper programming should begin with computer science degree and started with learning Java or C++ or C, it is very difficult to find a good job in programming. But, skills don’t go away easily once you learn them, and I hope that someone out there can be motivated by this post and go out there and learn coding and developing!

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