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Juan Luna
11,483 PointsA question about HTML/CSS and CMS
Hi, my name is Juan Felipe and I have a question; I'm a graphic designer from Bogotá, Colombia; I want to have a design studio and I know that doing webpages I will get more clients so that's why decided to learn HTML/CSS + Javascript in Treehouse; recently I heard about CMS (I didn't know what was that about but I know that Joomla and Wordpress are a really good option for my studio because in the beginning my clients will be little companies or something like that, nothing really big); now I'm confused because I know that CMS work with templates and that stuff and I'm not interested in get templates and edit them because I know how to do a site in HTML/CSS (I think in some cases that would be useful but I want to do webpages from scratch), my question is Should I focus my learning in how to do templates for Joomla or Wordpress? or Can I do a website from scratch like I'm used to and THEN implement a CMS to that site? I'm a little confused about that.
Thank you
3 Answers
robberbaron
23,869 PointsHi again,
your welcome. I agree with Aurelian that Wordpress really is a good option. Sass is a preprocessor. It helps you to write CSS more easily and much faster. Git is a version control system. In most projects the moment will come when the customer will change his mind and asks you to switch back to the version from the previous day or you just made some error and want to go back to a previous version. This is when Git comes in handy. Just tell Git that you want to go back to a certain earlier state that you recorded and voila you are there :-) Also finding bugs is easier with Git. For example you can tell Git that you have a bug and that you want to find the point in time where the bug arose. So git will present you an older version and ask whether the bug was included at that point of time. If no it will present you younger versions of the code until you found the exact time and also verison of the code where you introduced the bug... quite handy!
Cheers marc
And yes - as Aurelian said PHP is also good to learn for Wordpress.
Why not start with Wordpress and then choose one topic after the other whenever you might need it?
To confuse you completely :-) another thing that might be interesting for you is "Foundation" ... don't worry start with Wordpress and your good!
robberbaron
23,869 PointsHi Juan,
If you start with small customers that are looking for small solutions i would suggest that you clarify whether there is a need for your customer to update the site frequently. If no - it is probaly a good idea to code a page from without making use of a CMS.
If the customer needs to make frequent changes then go with a CMS like for example wordpress. It's not a shame to chose a template. I would even suggest that you do that as long as it is a small project and the budget limited. So it's not a bad idea to have a look into wordpress.
Of course you can create your own templates. But I don't know whether that pays of for small projects.
Maybe it's a good idea to start a little bit from different topics. I would suggest that you might have a look into Javascript, Wordpress, Sass and GIT. These things will bring you forward in your learning process and will also help you make the right decisions in which direction to go.
Cheers Marc
Juan Luna
11,483 PointsHi, thank for your answer, can you explain me what is Sass and GIT and why should I learn that? (I know that I need to learn Javascript because is part of web-design and Wordpress because is a CMS)
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 Pointsi Juana Luna, From what i know you can make a website in HTML and CSS and handle it ot back end developer . You can also go and leanr wordpress, in wordpress you need to know your way around with HTML and CSS so that would be good to learn from what i know. Back end developer you will need server language to host things or just to have a database . WP is a PHP software so learning PHP as a server language with it will be good. You need JavaScript for interaction like gallery that stuff.
As you know HTML and CSS , you can eather choose to learn PHP http://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/php-development or Ruby http://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/rails-development, go on the tracks and explore there but it will take quite a while i guess.
Or you can learn wordpress that would allow you to make a website without even looking at the code (maybe fordatabase yes not sure) but for better layout design some changes to code will help as cople days ago there was a request about it.
Choose what you like but maybe i guess Wordpress with Zac http://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/wordpress-development, would be good if you dont want to go on back end developer .