Web Development Education Help

[phuff]

Hi, I am a retail professional and I am very interested in learning how to build e-commerce websites for small to medium size businesses and learn about internet marketing. I am planning on going back to school but the choices in a web development education are very confusing. Any suggestions on what i should be studying? Thanks in advance for your help.

[cbVision]

When I went through Kent State University, I found it very beneficial to take semester long project based courses. Most projects involve the web in some sort of way, whether you're building a web site for the client or building a web based tool for your group to use. It allows you to figure out things on your own and utilizes a "teach yourself" approach, which I found much better than sitting through powerpoint lectures.

Some courses I wish my university had were maybe e-commerce specific courses dealing with SEO and marketing. These types of courses will help you understand best practices for what websites should have. Maybe a user interface course as well.

If you're just starting out, I'd recommend going through the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tutorials at www.w3schools.com. Once you become more familiar, you'll want to investigate a server side language such as PHP and a database such as MySQL.

Anyway, good luck!

[sohguanh]

When I went through Kent State University, I found it very beneficial to take semester long project based courses. Most projects involve the web in some sort of way, whether you're building a web site for the client or building a web based tool for your group to use. It allows you to figure out things on your own and utilizes a "teach yourself" approach, which I found much better than sitting through powerpoint lectures.

Some courses I wish my university had were maybe e-commerce specific courses dealing with SEO and marketing. These types of courses will help you understand best practices for what websites should have. Maybe a user interface course as well.

If you're just starting out, I'd recommend going through the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tutorials at www.w3schools.com. Once you become more familiar, you'll want to investigate a server side language such as PHP and a database such as MySQL.

Anyway, good luck!

Just to add-on, the new trend seem to be Open Source mobile applications nowadays. Previously, the mobile applications developed are proprietary to the phone model and brand but now with Google Android, the tide is turning. Imagine an application written once can run on multiple phone models as long as they use Android OS.

As a phone is much easier to carry around compared to a laptop or net-book, there are potential in this area of development. Do consider mobile technology as an add-on to the Web portion.

My 1 cent worth of opinion :D