There are many people who when asked ” If you were starting in the online business today, what would you wish you had a knowledge of to start with? ” and you’ll get a ton of different answers.
Some will say ‘a better grasp of marketing’ while others will say ‘knowing php or asp or html’ and some will say ‘photography‘ or ‘how to encode videos’. In short, the answers are wide and varied, but there are some basics, that one should have some knowledge in.
The problem today is that there is so much to know, that for one person, you could spend an eternity trying to get a comprehensive grasp of everything, just to open your doors, that you would spend years before actually having a site. In fact, I am sure there are many half started projects out there, that will never be completed, as the owner is busy learning all the new tricks and languages, that seem to pop up every day.
I started knowing zip, and frankly I know zip today. But I do have a grasp of HTML, CSS, and even a smattering of PHP. However if I was to single out any one item, to know better than just a passing idea of what it is, that would be CSS & PHP.
CSS is what drives the style of a site, which makes it look good, great, or horrible. It is a pain too, because like everything online, certain browsers will render a standard code differently, and people use different browsers. Now maybe it would be okay, if we all upgraded to the one browser, but even different versions of browsers will render the same code differently. So we get stuck into tweaking the code, to make it close in as many browsers as possible.
So a knowledge of CSS is a big help.
However, the more I tweak themes, the more I want to do something a certain way, or add a certain bit of something to a site, I am finding I need to understand the language being used. Whether it is HTML or PHP, with PHP being the new standard.
With Google and other search engines, reading code better, PHP as a dynamic coding medium is the one of choice for most things. From blogs to directories, so how it works, seems important to learn, and yet to me, it makes no sense. HTML, on the other hand, seems very straight forward, none of this ‘if this, then that’ stuff that PHP relies on.
So for me, I think that one of the most important things a new webmaster needs to know, is ‘how to use the search engines to find the answers’ because it is out there, but if you don’t know how to quickly access that info, you will waste a lot of time. Time is money, when pushing out sites, or adding to them. Being stuck on some code, some technique, is wasting that time.
While it is nice to know CSS, HTML, PHP, etc, it is more important to know HOW TO FIND THE INFORMATION YOU NEED.
Feb 13th by Malcontent