Tricks of the Trade

or is it all just hard work?

[SlowMove]

HTML, optimization, link development, Perl, etc. There's a lot of work involved in learning these things. Is that all there is or are there any tricks to get the fast money?

[eman]

Fast money is great, but it's gonna bite you in the butt in the long run. You can use any standard editor to take care of the HTML like Dreamweaver or (the free yet not professional) Netscape Composer. You can use Adobe GoLive, but then don't expect to go back and edit your pages by hand if you learn HTML. GoLive puts in what I call "crap code", stuff that you can't understand without studying it for 3 hours. I don't know a thing about optimization, link development is covered in your editor. I don't know PERL, I use PHP and MySQL, and you just have to learn it.

The big catch is that if you don't know HTML, programming in PHP is impossible since you don't know what to put in the echo statements, I would assume PERL is similar if not exactly the same way. You can't build a dynamic page if you don't know what HTML code to output to the page in the first place.

In my opinion, take the long route, basic HTML will take you an evening to learn at most, and then pick up a book on PERL and use dreamweaver to make your pages.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I don't think there is an easy way around it.

[tedster]

Sure there are things you might call "tricks" in all areas of web development -- but they usually can't be understood or used properly until a person has done basic the work of climbing the learning curve.

The promise of "fast money" on the web was the ugly hype of the '90s and it raised expectations well beyond anything reasonable.

[SlowMove]

Maybe I shouldn't have included HTML in the list. There was really nothing to learning it. As a matter of fact, I've seen some sites with really heavy traffic that use very basic markup and no CSS at all. I've got sites with thousands of pages, and some good links, but I see sites doing much better, and I want to know what it is that they're doing. That's what I meant by tricks of the trade.

[Webwork]

Forget all of that and just become a master of running PPC campaigns on AdWords, Overture, etc.

Or so Shak seems to assert ;-)

[rcjordan]

>see sites doing much better, and I want to know what it is that they're doing.

And that's where the work comes in. There are some tricks, yes, but a lot of the really good ones require a little more firepower than the usual developer will have.

[SlowMove]

>There are some tricks, yes, but a lot of the really good ones require a little more firepower than the usual developer will have.

So, if I were to try to become a better developer, and move beyond building basic database driven sites, is there any advice that you could offer?

[Eric_Jarvis]

the best advice I can give is to learn the first rule of marketing...get into the customers head

the biggest mistake a lot of people make is to develop a site or a business model that doesn't actually operate well from the customer's POV...in fact that's the most important thing...learn to do that and you'll always be ahead of the game