I\'m thinking of freelancing and building web sites in my free time. I have expe
ID: 651158 • Letter: I
Question
I'm thinking of freelancing and building web sites in my free time.
I have experience in C#/ASP.NET, JavaScript/jQuery as well as HTML/CSS and SQL. Thus, I feel like I have sufficient web technologies knowledge to go down this path.
What I'm unsure of is if there are any tools which can be used to simplify the life of a freelance web dev. As an example, I once designed an e-commerce website from scratch as a University project, which took around 3 months of hard work to accomplish. The finished product was not even hosted, and I didn't delve into any security aspects. I never even hosted a website or database before!
What concerns me is that there are millions of sites out there which can for example be used to create an e-commerce site in minutes. Without having to bother with databases, security and other issues. You don't even need to know how to code in server-side technologies to get these sites up and running.
Do professional web developers actually use these tools? If a client had to request an e-commerce site (for example), how would a pro go about developing it? I hear a lot about CMS systems like Joomla and Wordpress, but I think my main problem is that I don't know much about the available tools (other than Visual Studio) and I wouldn't know where to get started.
Can anyone guide me in the right direction?
Explanation / Answer
Wordpress
It is cheap, fast, and pretty good. It has grown and taken a lot of pages on the web pretty quickly.
Wikipedia reports that according to Alexa, it is used for 14.7% of the top million websites, and 22% of new pages in 2011, and is the leading content management system.
I have used it for simple stuff and found it pretty easy. I have seen demos that looked fantastic (and some no so much), and I believe there are premium themes and a boat load of plug-ins that provide broad and unique capability.
I think you can use a lot of web technologies with it, but it may have trouble playing well with C# .NET, and ASP.
Another option, given that it sounds like you have some investment in Microsoft technologies like C# would be Windows 8 / Visual Studio 2012 / Metro.
I think it can be used to lay down apps or web pages from templates, do data binding with XAML, JS, etc. because they say they are adopting open source technologies into their tools.
I recently saw a presentation by a guy from Google on Angular JS. It might have some learning curve, but what I saw certainly looked good in terms of exploiting HTML 5, separating view logic from business logic. It seemed to pretty graciously handle data binding as well.
Good luck in your quest for simple and productive tools with the desired level of flexibility and power.