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General Discussion

Posted by Josh Miller
Josh Miller
2,731 Points

best web design/development tools used?

Hey I am interested in learning web design/development and was wondering what the best tools are to use?

I have been told wordpress is the easiest and most common but that was only one person.

What is everyones thoughts ?

1 Answer

Codin - Codesmite
Codin - Codesmite
8,600 Points
Codin - Codesmite
Codin - Codesmite
8,600 Points

I personally do not recommend Wordpress as a CMS, I believe it to be bloated and tends to lead to a lot of bad practices in new developers because it has many pitfalls that new developers tend to fall into and a lot of new developers do not really know how it works because they haven't learnt the language that Wordpress is made with (PHP).

Personally the only tool that I believe a developer/web designer cannot live without is a good IDE or text editor.

I reccomend "Sublime Text 2" as a text editor and personally use this for everything myself, it has an unlimited time free evaluation, for commercial use one licence is only $70 and allows you to install it on multiple devices and machines, and it is cross-platform working on Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac.

http://www.sublimetext.com/

For IDE's I have always preffered Netbeans, but there are many better alternatives and other options out there also for free (I tend to use Sublime Text for everything lately anyway).

https://netbeans.org/

I think a good starting place would be to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery, these are core skills that will help you in any path in web development and design. Then if you are interested in learning Wordpress I highly reccomend learning PHP first to get a better understanding of how Wordpress works (If you get good enough at PHP you will find like myself that Wordpress might not be the best option anyway, I tend to make my own CMS as it allows more control on my end of the project and more restricted control to the end client).

I reccomend these tracks in this order:

  1. Web Design: https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/web-design
  2. Front-End Development https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/front-end-web-development
  3. Full Stack Javascript https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/fullstack-javascript
  4. PHP Development https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/php-development
  5. Learn Wordpress https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/learn-wordpress
  6. Wordpress Development https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/wordpress-development

This is all my personal opinion and advice to what I think would be a good place to start to get a good grasp of web development before diving into PHP CMS systems such as Wordpress.

Josh Miller
Josh Miller
2,731 Points

thanks :)