I’m here because like many of us I’m looking for a career change. One of the main reasons for me wanting a change is to become more location independent.
My plan is to learn enough to start building and selling basic website packages for small businesses/service type businesses to begin with (think local plumbers, electricians etc). This is something I could start part time and learn a lot during the process.
I was planning on using wordpress for this. I have previously run small businesses on wordpress and prior to coming here I was already able to make average but usable worpress sites.
One thing that is bugging me is the design aspect. I prefer the technical/development side and don’t consider myself overly creative, nor do I have any graphic design skills (yet). In your opinion can the creative aspect be learned? If so are there any resources you’d like to recommend?
What exactly do I need to master? (HTML, CSS, PHP…)
What do I need to learn that would be useful?
Realistically, how long should it take to learn all of the skills required to build and sell simple wordpress sites for service type businesses?
Is this a realistic pathway, or do you think that I need to work for a web development company first?
Thanks in advance!
This is a path I wanted to take for a long time as well, but I think in addition to knowing your way around wordpress and php you really have to have solid networking skills too, which I don’t have and why I ultimately switched my focus to just getting an inhouse role somewhere.
One youtube channel I followed closely a while back is BrettDev, a wordpress developer who lives abroad in Thailand doing exactly what you are saying you want to do. Here is a link to a pretty good video of his where he outlines what you will need to know and how long it takes to get there: Become A WordPress Web Developer
The video is a couple years old now but I think the general path you’d take is probably similar. Also some of the books he recommends are going to be out of date by now, so I would just look for an equivalent Udemy course or something on the same subject.
Wordpress has a big chunk of the web design market, even wp is pretty requested in freelance sites.
You should check out some wp tutorials in youtube and tools for web design, for example Divi (elegantthemes), and start building some web pages because it is a wp is a complete tool but like everything, you need practice.
Then, if you complete the Responsive Web Design Certification with freeCodeCamp, would be enough!
Thanks for taking the time to help me out, I’ll be sure to check out those resources!
Ultimately, I want to master much more than wordpress but its a step in the right direction.
There are a lot of WP sites out there and a lot of work for it, but it is also mostly simple work so there is a lot of competition with people working for peanuts. It think that unless you have amazing skills and/or have the PHP skills to do actual WP development, that is going to be a hard way to make a living unless you live somewhere where you can live dirt cheap. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just not easy.
I think that tools to create simple web sites are going to get better and better and so devs that want to do well are going to have to get better and better at more complicated sites. It used to be that you can make a living with just HTML and CSS. Now someone can hop on youtube and build a WP site with a functioning backend for by themselves.
I think the goal is to become the best, strongest developer you can. I don’t usually recommend going down the WP road. The other problem is that WP uses PHP which, imho, if WP didn’t exist would be slowly dying.
But ymmv. Give it a shot. I’m sure there are people that would disagree with much of what I’ve said here.