Your Web Development Toolkit

Hello good people!

Well the terrible slide in earnings continues! Yesterday brought $24 in Adsense income and $12 in amazon income. $36 total is a far cry from the $150 a day or more of the holiday shopping season. The only thing to do is keep our heads down and keep building new sites and see what happens in a few weeks!

Today I want to talk about something that most of you aren’t going to want to hear, but it’s something I think is incredibly important.

Every day I get tons of email from people saying “You obviously have a lot of skills in web development, programming languages, etc. I could never do that”. Or some variation of that. They usually go on to ask me why I don’t just release templates for them to use…

I’ve said in the past that I’m going to release templates, and I still plan on doing that…but it makes me uneasy.

Masters of your own fate…

One of the great things about living the adsense lifestyle is that it gives you independence. That’s what I love about it at least. But you aren’t really independent if you rely on templates and solutions from other people.

Learning just a few relatively simple web development skills can really free you for life. You’d really be crazy not to learn these things. So what should you learn?

• html
• php
• Maybe wordpress
• Maybe Mysql database stuff
• Maybe basic webserver administration

That’s a full list, really all you need to learn are the first two things, html and php.

Do it for free…

HTML is dead easy. It’s not like a regular programming language like C or even php. It’s written in plain english, and very straight forward. You can use an editor like XSitepro or dreamweaver or something, or just write it yourself using notepad (that’s what I do).

You can learn for free reading simple tutorials posted all over the internet. Or you can buy an HTML for dummies type book or “teach yourself HTML in 21 days” type book.

Learning html unlocks so many doors, free’s you from needing to use a clunky cms like wordpress, and generally is just great to know.

Likewise, php is pretty simple too. You don’t need to be a pro, or learn all there is to know about php. The things I use it for are VERY SIMPLE. Heck, you don’t even really need to learn how to write php code, just learn what it is and how to implement it, and the very basic functions of it.

That allows you to use the millions of free examples of php code on the Internet, and allow you to kind of tweak someone else’s code to do what you want it to do.

For instance, you know I use php to spin articles. You can do a google search for “php code to spin articles” and probably find a dozen scripts already written, for free. Some may do exactly what you need, others might need a little tweaking.

The point is, if you take the time to learn the basics of php, you can easily tweak other people’s code to make it do what you need. Or at the very least, learn how to upload and implement php code on your site.

And the same holds true for HTML. If you learn it, you can use the millions of free html templates on the Internet, then just tweak them a little. If you already know the basics of html, tweaking someone else’s template is a snap.

It’s your life…

These are skills you can use for the rest of your life. The Internet isn’t going anywhere, why not learn to master the tools that run the Internet? You’ll never regret spending the time to do it, and it can make you rich. Seems like a win win to me…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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