So You Want To Be A Web Developer

First off, it's not nearly as glamorous as it was back in 1999. Gone are the days of 6 figure salaries for people who could spell VB right two times out of three. You have to have some degree of actual technical knowledge to get a job as a web developer these days. Companies don't have the time or money to waste on people who don't know what they are doing. Here's an example of the sorts of things you'll be asked to do as a web developer:

We need to be able to go to the site and get an Excel spreadsheet that shows us who has what permissions on the website. By Monday.

We'll come back to that.

If you're in a company that has a need for a web developer, you can volunteer to help out. Keep in mind that this will likely only work at small companies that don't already have some sort of web development effort or where one of the people who used to do the web work has recently left. If they are planning on leaving, ask to be trained to replace them. Can't get your foot in the door? Start small, work on projects for local businesses and learn all you can about lifecycle development (from concept to deployment, which means learning about requirements gathering, business process, design, coding, qa, domain registration, and deployment). I'll assume for this piece that you are interesting in being a web developer, and not a graphic artist. You will have to invest time and I would advise you to invest money in some good reference books as well. Reference books are the lifeblood of the developer. Coriolis and O'Reilly are kings of the hill at the moment, while HungryMinds and Wiley and a few others are also putting out some quality titles.

The Basics

Know HTML? Great. That's not enough. It's a given that you know HTML. JavaScript is necessary. You have to be able to create complex layouts using tables, CSS, and they need to be viewable in both Netscape and IE (and keep in mind that there are other browsers out their gaining in popularity every day). Become one with forms. You will use them. A lot. If you put Front Page on your resume, you will not get any calls. Trust me. Learn a real editor. If you're a more visual person, Dreamweaver is probably THE most popular choice. For the more technically minded, Homesite tends to be the editor of choice. Mac users tend to use BBEdit, unix geeks of course have many many options the most popular of which tend to be emacs or vi. You'll also need to know how to more than copy someone else's JavaScript and change the variable names. You'll primarily be using it for form validation making dynamic elements.

Basic familiarity with the core internet protocols: HTTP, FTP, Telnet, SSH, SSL, SMTP. Obviously, HTTP is the most important of these ...

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