Give me a little more confidence for my end-game goal here. (Front-End Hopeful)

I would definitely work through the Front-End Web Development track and the Web Designer track, and practice practice practice on your own. Just start building websites for anything. Have a cat? Make a website about your cat. Favorite band? Make a fansite. You don't ever have to actually publish them onto the Internet, but just keep building them for practice. I've made a couple websites for clients, but I also decided I wanted to go back to school to get a deeper understanding and hopefully get a job after I graduate.

Good luck!

Keep on learning! It will all pay off. Just think, what happens if something goes wrong on your friends site? Is she going to have the knowledge to go into the code and fix it? Wordpress is very simple to get up and running, and I know because I work with it quite a bit at my current job. But the problem is, it really limits your ability to customize. I would really keep going and throw some javascript/jQuery into the mix when you feel comfortable with it. Knowing Javascript and jQuery really will put you over the edge as a front end developer. And quite honestly, It doesn't hurt to dabble in photoshop/illustrator which you can download a free trial of. Some front-end jobs may expect you to at least know your way around if you needed to.

You would be surprised at how much trouble people even have with sites like wordpress. I was trying to help someone today that had a formatting issue and the easiest way to fix it was to go to the code editor (as opposed to the visual) and just manually enter in the HTML code.

I am a self taught programmer too and I can tell you that it does take a lot more focus and determination. There are nights where I just have to commit to sitting down with my laptop and learn more about coding. With the help of the internet and places like stackoverflow.com it is easy to keep pressing on. Honestly, the best thing you can do is get your hands dirty with your own sites too. Make some sites and build up a portfolio, you may even want to consider doing a website or two for free. I am sure there are soup kitchens or non-profits that would love you help with their website from the 90's and you can build up your knowledge even more. As I've been applying for more coding jobs the one thing I always see them ask for is a portfolio. The important part is that you love doing coding. That means naturally you want to do it more. Good luck!!!!! If you ever need any more help or advice with coding you can really feel free to contact me via email at ajk4550 @ gmail.com. I am by no means an expert but I had to learn web stuff all on my own including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP and now I am learning Ruby on Rails and I would love to be able to help someone if they are in need of it.

Thank you so much, both of you! I appreciate the encouragement!

I started learning to code for a few reasons, and one of them was the frustration with Wordpress. If you have a theme that looks 100% what you like, it is awesome, but most of the time you want to change something. It is horrible! Plus with every added plugin it was slower and slower. There is a lot of people that all they need is wordpress site, but for now Web Programming is still a better career choice than most jobs. Or so I keep telling myself :-)