Let’s say you have a great website idea, it’s something you feel passionately about, and you want to start a small company based on that website. How do you go about actually getting it off the ground? I’m not talking about the final vision of your site that takes a team of people to create and maintain; I’m talking about the prototype or the alpha build of the site.
If you think that most websites take a team of people to work on it then take this site as an example. I have tried to write this post using my last post as a guideline. Start out small with a few people and then grow from there.
The best way to make that website happen is if you do it yourself. So you’re going to have to learn the languages of the web. Before that though you should learn some programming techniques that are not just web specific namely “for and while” loops, “if else” statements, and functions, the language I would recommend for learning those is C. Once you know what those are you can start on web specific languages.
These are your markup languages, you must wield these to mold and craft the design of the page. HTML is the markup this will determine what gets displayed, you can right click on a webpage and view source, this will be what you see. CSS is how that markup will be displayed. The position, colors, fonts, and some effects will be determined by your CSS stylesheet.
PHP is the programming language you will be using. MySQL is the database language that many people put together with it. For learning both to a level where you can get your idea off the ground, I recommend Beginning PHP5, Apache, and MySQL Web Development. It teaches you everything you need to get started. The way I learned this book was through sheer grinding, I typed out every piece of code. While doing that I actually saw how the language worked, and now I’m very comfortable with it.
I have left this language for last because I have yet to master it. I have taken a javascript course and have read some tutorials. I have yet to find a really good book on the subject so if you have any suggestions let me know. My recommendation here is use Jquery, there is a lot of documentation online and it really simplifies the process of writing Javascript, allowing you to do more in less time and get your idea off the ground faster.
One note on these languages; while you are learning them and you find a website that helps you solve a problem, sign up for a delicious account and save the link. That tool has helped me countless times (actually 548 times as of right now, cause that’s how many links I have, but I have still gone back countless times).
My last recommendation in this section is on the operating system. Like many, I was a Windows user for my main Desktop. I had played around with Linux and I even dual booted my machine with Ubuntu. But it wasn’t until I switched completely to Linux did my web development skills take off. Getting PHP and MySQL up and running on your system is much easier with Ubuntu, and Komodo Edit makes the process of writing code, dare I say, fun.
Before I started this project I knew my skills lied in the coding aspect of the web. While at a Javascript course I met my friend George Barrett. He is a graphic designer that was trying to learn more coding skills, when we decided to work together it turned out really well. If you have more graphic design skills then coding skill maybe this blog post needs to written in reverse and you need to find a programmer. However, in my case it worked out well.
Now I know someone is going to come to me and say, “But Abe, I don’t have a predisposition to either, my skills are in ___.” I would say learn to do at least one item, either graphic design or programming, your chances of meeting one person that complements your skills is a lot higher than meeting two people to complement your skills. If you have been unsuccessful in finding peers to work with then stay tuned for a blog post on learning graphic design (you might have to wait a while because I still have to learn it before I can blog about it).
Lets say you have your site, it’s up and running, and its on your computer. How do you let everyone know about it. Well you need a domain name, which you should buy before you hit step 1. Then you need web hosting. When the site is first starting out you can probably get away with the cheapest shared hosting plan available. But soon you will want to switch to a dedicated server as you start advertising your site. The funny thing is they each come with their difficulties of setting up; shared hosting might be easier when you are just beginning because of the control panel that hosting providers have, but some of your PHP code might run differently. A dedicated server is more like setting up your own Linux box.
The simplest thing to do here would be to point you to this blog post that I used to find out how to advertise. I have followed their advice and if you are reading this then it worked. As far as becoming really popular, I’m am still trying to figure that one out.
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