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HTML

Posted by Hossam Salem
Hossam Salem
842 Points

I need a path .. please help

Hello everyone ,

I am currently a beginner and following the Front End development track which is pretty cool but I would like to know what do i need to learn after that track to be able to make a modern HTML5/CSS3 template that I can sell on those well known Theme markets.

I have seen that most of the themes nowadays are made by bootstrap or foundation5.

So Could you please suggest me the next steps i need to take to be able to make a modern template ?

Thank you for your time..

Codin - Codesmite
Codin - Codesmite
8,600 Points

Key things you need to focus on if you are selling pre-made themes.

  1. Responsive Design - Unless your design is very niche and has a special reason not to be responsive you are going to struggle to sell it, nearly everyone requires a responsive design. Nearly 80% of internet users have and use a smart phone or tablet to browse the internet, its a huge market share.

  2. If your theme is customizable, document as much as you can, comment your code to make it easier to read to make changes, in the long run this will reduce the amount of end user support questions and queries you will recieve (You will generally find this is actually a requirement in a lot of the popular theme marketplaces like envato etc).

  3. Wordpress themes are very popular amongst the pre-made selling markets because it is easy for an end user to set up without having to know much about webdesign or databases. (I personally do not like it but find my wordpress themes have more of a market).

  4. Beyond that its up to you and comes down to what type of websites you ideally want to be building. I learnt PHP, SQL, MongoDB and Apache after HTML5 and CSS mainly because I build huge content websites that need a strong CMS and I don't like using premade CMS as I find them restricting.

Hossam Salem
Hossam Salem
842 Points

Thanks for the important info Ashley I am still a noob , i just began learning Html and css here on treehouse. I started with the Front End development track, and I would like to know what other tracks / courses I need to learn next.

1 Answer

Codin - Codesmite
Codin - Codesmite
8,600 Points

Posted my answer as a comment by accident :)

Key things you need to focus on if you are selling pre-made themes.

  1. Responsive Design - Unless your design is very niche and has a special reason not to be responsive you are going to struggle to sell it, nearly everyone requires a responsive design. Nearly 80% of internet users have and use a smart phone or tablet to browse the internet, its a huge market share.

  2. If your theme is customizable, document as much as you can, comment your code to make it easier to read to make changes, in the long run this will reduce the amount of end user support questions and queries you will recieve (You will generally find this is actually a requirement in a lot of the popular theme marketplaces like envato etc).

  3. Wordpress themes are very popular amongst the pre-made selling markets because it is easy for an end user to set up without having to know much about webdesign or databases. (I personally do not like it but find my wordpress themes have more of a market).

  4. Beyond that its up to you and comes down to what type of websites you ideally want to be building. I learnt PHP, SQL, MongoDB and Apache after HTML5 and CSS mainly because I build huge content websites that need a strong CMS and I don't like using premade CMS as I find them restricting.

I would reccommend these tracks in regards to selling themes:

  1. Webdesign Track (Has a section on Responsive design techniques and is generally a good track on general layout design).
  2. Learn Wordpress Track (Learn from a user level how wordpress functions and works).
  3. Wordpress Development (Learn how to develop more advanced features for wordpress run websites)

Then you can start aiming for more advanced paths such as a frontend scripting language like Javascript / Jquery, a Backend Serverside scripting language such as PHP, Python, Ruby etc and even a database such as SQL, noSQL or MongoDB.