learning to be a developer...

[Jackleman]

Hi,

I am currently self-employed as a search engine marketing consultant for most of my time, I have been doing this for about a year and half. Prior to that I worked for some of the largest classifieds websites in Europe. I have an excellent understanding of websites, online marketing and eBusiness as a whole. However I want to start developing my own sites. I have had a few websites of my own before including quite a large eCommerce site. So I have the ability to go and tweak style sheets, HTML etc to help formatting and SEO.

I would like to get to the ability now to design and code my own sites, not just boring static HTML pages but more like dynamic database driven sites such as classifieds sites. Ideally I would teach myself but getting some training would also be something I would consider. I am not looking to sell my services once I have the skills, more to develop my own web properties. So the question is, what is the quickest and best route for me to take to get me to standard where I can do this kind of work for myself?

Thanks in advance.

[matt28]

Well, it depends what you want to do. You can take open source portals / cms systems, such as this one:
http://www.mojoportal.com/

And do the customisation yourself

Alternatively, you can build from the ground up, resulting in complete flexibility, albeit at a higher development cost. For this you'll need to learn a technology stack (for instance linux/apache/php/mysql or c#/asp.net/sqlserver).

To start with, I'd take a portal such as the one above and configure it.

[gamefreaks]

There have been a couple of threads like this recently...

http://www.pistonheads.co.uk/gassing/topic.asp?h=0...

http://www.pistonheads.co.uk/gassing/topic.asp?h=0...

[petemurphy]

http://www.lynda.com/Member.aspx