Getting a Web Development Job For Dummies

Kathleen Taylor, Bud E. Smith

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118967768
• eBook ISBN: 9781118967782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Web Design

Craving a career in web dev? Chart your path with this helpful guide

Getting a Web Development Job For Dummies provides a roadmap to one of the "hot jobs" in the booming world of tech. The web development field is large, and it encompasses many actual functions. This book helps you understand the web development career opportunities and determine the path you should take, based on your own personal needs and preferences, to launch your career. You'll learn about various career options, the skills you'll need to become an attractive candidate, how to go about learning the ropes, and proving your abilities to a potential employer or client. With so many possible goals and no one right way to get there, this book cuts through the confusion to put you on the path to a career you want.

The web development industry is expected to grow for the foreseeable future, and there is already a shortage of trained workers to fill the jobs. Whether you lean technical or aesthetic, you can find your place in the industry with right skills—both hard and soft—and with the right plan. Getting a Web Development Job For Dummies is your guide to formulating that plan and getting started right.

• Find formal or informal ways to build the tech skills you'll need
• Discover where you fit, whether as a freelancer or within an organization
• Learn how to build a resume, develop a portfolio, and impress interviewers
• Get expert tips on finding resources, building a reputation, and more

If your pet peeves include malfunctioning forms, flashing banners, and sites that take way too long to load, the web development world needs you. But before you begin your journey, you need a destination and a route in mind. Getting a Web Development Job For Dummies is your roadmap, so you can set out today.

Part I

Getting a Job in Web Development

Check out www.dummies.com/extras/gettingawebdevelopmentjob for more great content online.

In this part …

• Understand why web development matters
• Explore web development career paths
• Understand organizations that hire web development professionals
• Learn about the web development jobs market in the U.S.

Chapter 1

Seeing the Big Picture of Web Development Jobs

In This Chapter

Discovering why web development has so many jobs

Understanding why companies care about web development

Figuring out what are some of the main kinds of sites

Seeing which jobs go with which kinds of sites

Web development is the largest and fastest-growing area of employment today. Web development includes technically oriented people who write computer programs, graphic designers who never see a line of computer code, content and marketing experts who concentrate on the visual and verbal appeal of a page, and many more experts and dabblers.

The ways in which people work in web development are as many and varied as the kind of work that is covered by the web development umbrella. Many people work traditional “day jobs,” but you will also see just as many people in a garage startup working 80 hours a week, contractors, consultants, part-timers, and people who will give you crucial insights that save your project just because you were good enough to buy them lunch.

The reason for the many and varied job descriptions, and the many and varied ways of working, in web development is simple: The web is the greatest creative canvas in human history. The rapid and continuing growth of the web is driven by the appeal of simple combinations of words and pictures, abetted now by multimedia, laid out in easy to scan and attractive ways, and offering users functionality from the simplest task — reading a newspaper article, say — to a dashboard that displays the operational status of a multibillion-dollar factory (or a multibillion-dollar war). Art, music, photography, creative writing, commerce — almost anything that people do is delivered by the web, or supported by content and functionality delivered by the web.

Only some of the work roles that support the wonders of the web are considered “web development jobs.” Here are a few descriptive phrases to help narrow down what we can consider part of the web development world:

• Technical: Web development jobs usually involve dealing with the technical considerations that are unique to the web — from the computer code that runs it, to the markup languages that control the delivery and display of words and images, to the hardware and software functionality that determines whether a web page appears quickly or slowly, to the often complex and demanding tools that are used to create websites and web content.
• Creative: The web is so new that there are relatively few rules in web development. The best way to do most things has usually not been found yet, let alone widely discussed, agreed, and set in concrete. Instead, a willingness to improvise, to try new things — and to search widely, and quickly, for the best of what other people are doing — is crucial to web development work.
• Fast-changing: The web development world is constantly and unrelentingly changing. Some things that used to be unreliable are now settled, such as the basics of HTML and even, dare we say it, CSS. (HTML, HyperText Markup Language, is the simple code that specifies parts of text, such as headlines or emphasized text, and that shows where to find an image file that will be displayed on the page. CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, is a newer kind of code that gives you considerable flexibility and control in onscreen page layout.) But more things are changing — new capabilities, new tools, new programming languages, and new best practices. (“Best” being a relative term here.)
• Varied: There are many specialists in web development, but people are expected to be multi-skilled, and to move away from less-needed or even obsolete skills to new abilities that are on today’s cutting edge. As an example, many web developers made a good living tweaking HTML markup and CSS code to make a web page work well on different personal computer web browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. That area has largely settled down, and many of the same people are now making the same web page work well on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, using the new versions of the same standards — HTML5 and CSS3.

We could go on, but this list captures the wide and fast-changing world of web development as well as any brief description can. And this list helps us to identify the one common element that is the most important in distinguishing the web development world, and the most crucial characteristic of the many, many people who thrive in it.

The common element in web development is change; most areas of web development are changing quickly. Even where technical standards have settled down, how and even why we do things in web development continue to evolve. Styles come and go, such as web pages with big images and few words; needs change, as with the unrelenting growth of mobile.

And the most important characteristic of successful web development people is the secret to accommodating this rapid pace of change: a love of learning. It’s great for a web developer to love change in and of itself, but what helps her thrive in that fast-changing world is the desire to swim better in these fast-flowing currents by picking up new information, new skills, new attitudes, and new ways of working.

The fact that you’re reading this book shows that you probably have this core characteristic, this love of learning. You aren’t happy with a top ten list or a brief video clip when you face a serious issue, and a big opportunity, such as moving over to, or moving up in, the world of web development. Of course, you will probably look at many top ten lists and video clips as well; there are several of each associated with or linked to from this book. But, as a reader of this book, you’re willing to do some heavy lifting to understand this still-new world. Welcome!

Getting Why Web Development Matters

Web development matters because the web matters in so many ways that we could take this whole chapter just to briefly describe them all.

Here’s one way of describing how important the web has become, and how quickly it has grown in importance. One of us, Bud Smith, was working for Apple Computer in 1994. (Which, luckily, was nothing like 1984 — that’s an old Apple joke.)

Smith started hearing about something called the World Wide Web, and seeing Mosaic, an early web browser, on developers’ screens. He quickly pulled together a book proposal, and he was soon the proud co-author of an early web book, Creating Web Pages For Dummies (Wiley). This book went to nine editions and is still in print more than 20 years later. That’s about how long the web has been known to most people, as usage grew and grew and grew.

In that time, the web has become ubiquitous in the developed world, and commonly used in the developing world. Facebook alone, which started out as a website and is now powered by mobile apps, has more than 1.3 billion monthly average users.

The web is now a major source of information, entertainment, commerce, computing capability, and more, and growing fast in all these areas every year. About ten percent of all retail sales go through the web in the developed world, and steady growth continues. Websites change all the time, and many mobile apps — a very fast-growing area of software — are simply repurposed, and simplified, websites.

Books, magazines, newspapers, the telephone, movies, and television are all important communications and entertainment media today, and all of them, in their traditional forms, are being disrupted by the web. That is, all of them partly depend on the web as infrastructure and distribution — and all of them see the web as competition. And one can hardly emphasize enough that this disruption is continuing year after year after year.

Also, none of the other media listed is also a front end for software. Inventor and entrepreneur Marc Andreesen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” This means that more and more of the things that people do are being converted to software. And more and more of that software is being presented to people through websites and apps. (See the sidebar “Is app development the same as web development?” for more.)

For an example, consider Amazon (www.amazon.com). Amazon stores and presents user reviews for an immense range of products. It displays a different version of its home page to you based on your past purchases. And it makes recommendations to you based on your past purchases and the content you’re currently looking at. It also lets you buy with a single click, if you wish. (This feature is almost unique to Amazon, which protects its intellectual property zealously.)

All this functionality is based in software — often quite consequential software. Amazon’s recommendation engine, for instance, is a major software engineering project in its own right, protected by patents and trade secrets just like other advanced technology.

What’s important here is that all this technology is presented through a web interface and is considered to be part of this market-leading website. As a supporting point, making a website work better is causing new and improved technology to be developed on a rapid and constant basis.

So you have the fastest-growing medium ever, and one that is at least as consequential as any other medium, ever. And it was invented and became popular not much more than a couple of decades ago. The size and importance of the web, its innovative use and creation of technology, and its incredibly rapid growth are the core reasons why web development is so important.

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Is app development the same as web development?

An app is a computer program that’s sold as a product in an app store: Apple’s iTunes App Store, the Google Play Store, or similar.

An app is, technically speaking, the same as an application — a computer program that’s sold as a product. But apps were designed for small-screen devices, such as the iPhone and A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting a Job in Web Development
• Part II: Core Technologies for Web Development
• Part III: Getting Your Education
• Part IV: Charting Your Career Path
• Part V: The Part of Tens
• About the Authors
• Cheat Sheet
• End User License Agreement