Given the predominance of the web today, anyone who learns to code will also usually need to know how to create a basic web page. Most of the skills you need are not really programming but they do require training to understand and can be quite complex. A website called The Odin Project provides a good definition of what a web developer does as well as paths to follow.
These are the basic categories of skills that are useful to have as a web developer:
- Graphical Design – You do not have to be a full-on graphical designer but, it is impossible to design and build a basic web site without being able to create basic images and to manipulate them.
- HTML – is used to create the content of a web page and is a fairly easy to understand templating language.
- CSS – While HTML tells the server what is on any given web page – Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) tell the server how to display it. This includes what colors, what fonts, how much padding, placement on the screen and more. While this can seem simple, there are layers and layers of complexity here.
- Content Management Systems: the exact figure is not know but about 75-90% of all websites created today are done using a CMS. These range popular ones like WordPress and Drupal to smaller ones that are more developer friendly like Perch or ModX. For older kids, start with WordPress as it is the easiest to use and is the clear market favorite.
- Basic Programming Skills: developing a website with CMS will give you a lot of functionality without having to code. But, there are often instances when you want to add a little extra via a simple tool or you need to create even more complicated functionality via custom code. For that some of the more popular web programming languages are Javascript, JQuery, and PHP.
- Ecommerce – this is really a set of the above skills but knowing the basics of how online interactions happen and what tools you can use to do this is critical.
- Database – Just like with HTML/CSS – a knowledge of how databases work and how to query data from them is very useful when it comes to creating and more often debugging a web site. Being able to access the data can let you figure out what is going on.
- Security – knowing the basics of how to keep your website safe from bots, spiders and viruses is key to not spending all your time fixing your website from hacking and malware attacks.