for only 199$

Never Pay For Online Web Courses

Written by

Walter G.

Published on

January 10 2015

Modified on

October 10 2017

Filed under

General

I recently saw an ad on the old YouTube for an online course in web development that guaranteed that you'll make money within some weeks by building websites from scratch, or your money back. Fascinating offer I thought. What pray tell can this course teach me? Took me years to start to make some money, so maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years. So I followed the link, feeding the ad best and followed the trail. And what I saw wasn't shocking unfortunately. I always wonder how people can, with a straight face, promise to teach you all of MySql, PHP, Bootstrap, Angular, ASP.NET in the course of weeks and then have the nerve to charge you 199$ for it. It's insulting to the developers that wake up every day, drink too much coffee and then spend 8+ hours a day solving problems for a company. So before you sign up for one of those online courses where you'll learn to "never work a day in your life", I'll break down what one of the most popular courses covers and hopefully convince someone out there that knowledge is free and there are much better ways to go about learning something in this day and age.

"This fast, effective course takes you easily from zero skills to fee-earning web developer in just six weeks."

Lastly, I'll mention that I'm all for more people taking interest and learning about programming and such. I'm more against the promise that after a few weeks of this "easy" course you'll be up and making money and people will be downloading your app or visiting your website by the millions or anything else that didn't involve years of hard work. Maybe that was true in the 90's when you could create a static page and slapped on ads and all kinds of random keywords, but the web nowadays has evolved beyond any of that. You need good content, good marketing and a bit of luck. And more importantly you need passion for the work. You can tell when you visit a website just how much work went into it and those are the websites that stick around for the long haul.

Step 1: Setting Up Your Web Server

Ok, so already I see a problem with this course. You have zero knowledge in programming or the web in general really, but already you're buying domains and setting up web servers? Why does the instructor do this? Well, maybe because the hosting provider they chose to show you pays them for referral traffic, which means they make a percentage of every new hosting account they help set up. Maybe. Just speculation on my part. You don't need to know what a web server is in order to make a website. In fact if you're starting off, this can be off putting, as technical jargon doesn't normally help in the learning process. You don't need to know about DNS or load balancers or anything of that nature just yet. You will, believe me, but not know. If you want to play with a website, just open up notepad, type in anything and save the file as a .html file. You now have a webpage of your very own. Your laptop or computer is just a good a server as any that you will pay monthly for, at least for development purposes.

Once your website is complete, then you'll want to go and pick a domain name and set up your server and such. By then you'll have more technical knowledge of websites as a whole and it should make more sense. When the time comes that is. This is like choosing which store you want carry you're revolutionary new product, before you even create that product.

Step 2: HTML

An important place to start. You can't learn about web development unless you know HTML. Here's the thing though. There are no real "tips" or "tricks" to learning it. You have content, such as text, images and videos, and you need to display them on the screen in a pleasing way. If you want to show a YouTube video you hit the share button on YouTube and copy and paste whatever it gives you to embed. There's only maybe a dozen or so HTML tags that you will use daily, and the others may or may not come up in your project.

If you do need a really good HTML reference, the only site I can recommend is w3schoos.com. It's 100% free, and covers pretty much any technology evar. That's the best tip I can give someone new to HTML. You don't need a 20 part course to learn it.

Step 3: CSS and Javascript

You can memorize every single CSS element known to man, and still make the world ugliest website. The only real thing to learn here is that every element you see on a webpage has style rules associated with them. If you want a blue background, you would specify background-color: blue. If you want to use a different font you would specify font-family: Impact. You don't need to memorize them. The more you use them the more second nature they become. Once you have your content ready for launch on your site, then you'll want to start thinking about style rules. And again, w3schools is a fantastic resource for that. If you wanted you could just type text in without any styling. I mean Craigslist does it, and it works wonders for them.

The course follows basic programming principles when teaching Javascript. It goes through conditional logic and loop statements and variables and arrays and such. Which are important concepts to learn, but I can't picture someone who is just starting off in the dev world sitting there going "I really need to iterate through this object collection right now". You don't technically need Javascript in order to make a website. This blog for example has very little Javascript associated with it, mainly because it doesn't need it. I write content, it displays it and categorizes it.

Step 4: jQuery

jQuery can totally simplify your dev life, if you're already a developer. There's tons of boilerplate code and common functions that jQuery provides that helps you get your site done quicker without worrying about a lot of little things. The best source of info and tutorials for jQuery however is at the official jQuery website. They offer in depth documentation for every method and module, and it's free and readily available for your learning pleasure. The jQuery Learning Center is full of actual examples that can implement on your website. But having said that, if you're a total noob to the web development world, I wouldn't complicate things further by throwing jQuery into the mix. Any website can run without jQuery and in fact it can be a crutch if you're and up and coming developer. If you need Javascript, use that instead, and after you're tired of the trivial tasks that are associated with it, you can move on to jQuery.

Step 5: Wordpress? Really

Then what's the point of learning anything else on this list? >_< Normally you have a choice to make when making a website. If it's a complex site, you create a database and fire up Apache and write some PHP and then create a few JS and CSS files to go with it. If it's something simple like a blog, you download and install Wordpress, find a theme and you're good to go. That's like telling someone that you're going to teach them all about ASP.NET, but first they need to install and set up Wordpress. I wouldn't mind if the tutorial for Wordpress was in depth and covered the subtle intricacies of Wordpress from a developer standpoint. But instead its a an hour long setup guide in which you'll hit install and then select a theme.

I'll Stop There For Brevity...

This goes on and on. A list of technologies that you may or may not one day use. The course covers them at the most basic level, which is great for beginners because they'll feel like they've learned alot by the end of the course. To make things seem more complex, it also mentioned the Google Maps API for some reason and a 5 minute overview of the Twitter API, because that's how long it takes to use it apparently. By the end of this course you will have memorized a few keywords and a few concepts. You won't have that next big idea, you won't know anything about SEO or user acquisition or design. You will know what a div is and how to make an alert box appear.

Knowledge Is Free

There are tons of awesome tutorials online for beginners and they're 100% free. Some good soul out there sat, wrote and decided to share the wealth with everyone. Earlier this year when I started to learn Angular.JS I found a few examples and tutorials from real world people, I copied and pasted the code and played around with it for a few hours. It was a fun learning experience and I could appreciate it more because I had to sit there and figure out where I had to go next. I wasn't being told to first learn this, then learn that, then end it with this.

Again, if you're 100% brand new to web development then this course will be amazing, you'll be learning all kinds of basic concepts and tools and think yourself the next Elon Musk of the web world. Which is why I'm against courses like these. Elon Musk didn't just learn "rocket goes up, fire goes out" and success happened. If anybody could just make a website and make 10,000$ monthly then they would. But Only 1 person benefits in this scenario, and that's the one person that's making a living off of this with the most minimal of work. I took a look at the course intructors personal website and wasn't shocked to find a bland theme sitting on top of Wordpress selling a revolutionary new learning method.

In 6 weeks time, you WONT learn CSS like the back of your hand like some reviewers mentioned. You WONT master javascript and get hired by Google. You might one day, with years of hard work for sure, and learning from mistakes, and talking to your peers about that next big idea. You won't do it by building a webpage that gets a record from a database, and then making the text blue.

Educate yourself and don't let anyone else try and educate you.

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