Beginners

It's kinda like trying to teach someone to swim though. Theory and instruction is great, but at some point, you're better served by just jumping in and getting wet. The projects might seem intimidating, but there are the deep dives that cover topics more thoroughly. And in my experience, the more badges you accumulate, the more things just start to gel together.

We have an awesome community too! So if you have any worries or questions, never hesitate to ask away

Milo,

I sense a little bit of frustration in your post above. :-) I know that some of the badges in the Become a Web Designer course accelerate quickly through content, and I can understand how overwhelming some of the content might seem to an absolute beginner. I think part of the reason this course covers so much content is because, in the case of the Become a Web Designer course, they want to give students an extensive overview of everything that goes into developing an effective, contemporary website that's well designed -- and as you can see, that's a lot of stuff to wrap your head around (e.g., HTML, CSS, responsive design methodologies, etc.).

I might ask what parts of the course you find unfavorable to novice designers. At what point do you feel that the content gets too complicated? I only ask because I know there are a lot of people who find some of the "Beginner" courses to be a bit difficult, especially if they are (as you say) tenderfoot designers and developers.

I encourage you to lodge your concerns to the Treehouse support team at help@treehouse.com; I know many of the teachers here at Treehouse are always looking for honest feedback on their courses, and they're all willing to field any questions you might have about the content their courses cover. If you let them know what project or badge are you currently working on, and what roadblocks are you stumbling over, they'll be able to direct your inquiry to the right person.

Of course, you can always feel free to hit up the forums! :-) There's an active community of Treehouse members who are more than happy to help others along through their coursework here at Treehouse!

Wishing you the very best,

J.T.

@Milo - I think the learning adventures, if done in order scale up the difficulty of content quite well. One thing that I have noted is that the Build an Interactive Website content is notably harder and that's by design.

JQuery is a flavor of JavaScript so that the JavaScript Foundations course is a prerequisite for the JQuery content. This content comes at the very end of the sequence and is labeled as advanced and is designed to be significantly harder than the Build a Basic Website course.

Don't take it personal guys I am just old and cranky. I have actually been a web designer for 16 years but have always farmed out my coding needs. I joined Treehouse to learn coding because the person who normally does it for me quit. Anyway long story short I have had a rough day getting through the "Form Validation and Manipulation" Section. It seems I keep having to find the answers on external websites and not in the actual treehouse video assigned to the various Code Challenges. The external sources are free and I am paying for Treehouse..... Hmmm!

On a bright note I have actually learned a great deal in this course even though I work on this stuff myself on a daily basis. The Responsive Design section is fantastic. You guys are certainly up on the latest technology. Also you made learning the new features of CSS 3 a breeze. I tend to be a little set in my ways but you guys have really opened my eyes to things that will make my life a lot easier.

I am about to start my first lesson, & want to make sure if I can get any beginners advice up front that will help me as I go along. I actually have a real company I am starting & would like to build out my website for it within these tutorials if that is possible. I have been a media provider for websites for years (Final Cut Pro Editor) but think it is now a good time to become a little bit better rounded going forward into the future. Any suggestions would be very welcome by me. - BB

Hi Billy, Yes you will certainly learn enough to get your own website up and running. You will be working on fictitious website called "It smells like bakin'" and they go over just about everything you could possibly need to build the site. I normally recommend the combo of 'Wordpress' and 'Elegant Themes' to total beginners but here you can learn what you need then make your own choice down the road. Good Luck to you.

@Milo - There's pretty big learning curve between design/CSS and coding/JQuery it tends to go both ways developers who try to learn about design often have a hard time with that as well.

My advice to some just learning to program is that, a large part of liking programming is enjoying spending several hours tracking down a stray semicolon. Most of the time spent coding is actually spent debugging.

Learning to find answers online is the single most valuable skill a programmer can find. I tend to think of Treehouse as giving a structure to learning setting a path of which topics you need to learn in which order. Treehouse isn't exactly the same as taking a class with a Professor where you expect all of the answers to come from the Professor's lectures or your text book.

You can't learn everything in one place. In terms of learning JQuery I always recommend people combine the Treehouse JQuery course with codecademy's exercises and read JavaScript and JQuery - the Missing Manual. Working through these 3 resources together will give you a much better and well rounded understanding of JQuery.