Why Would You Want to Learn How to Make a Website?

Pretty much every website design and development agency would tell you not to bother to learn how to make a website. They tell you this for a number of reasons, the main one being that it is actually a pretty complicated topic – especially if you are looking for a bespoke website. The truth is, you would probably be better off if you did learn how to make a website.

Now you probably think I am taking the mickey – I do have a tendency to do that. But in this case, I am actually being serious. Here is why I think you should learn how to make a website…

It makes my life easier

Let’s imagine that you have a beautiful website built by the best website design and development agency in the world. It does everything you could possibly want. You can even get it to communicate with the coffee machine in the kitchen and have it make you a cup of coffee.

Now imagine that you want to change the colour of the icons or increase the heading font by a pixel or two.

You’ve done this in Microsoft Word – it’s really easy. You just highlight text and set the font size to be whatever you want it. Don’t like it? You just click undo.

Therefore, you expect that a change like this should be a quick five minutes’ work for an experienced website developer. Then when I want to charge you half an hour to make your quick change, you exclaim and argue that it could not possibly take that long just to change a font size.

However, if you knew how to make a website and knew at least the basics of styling and compiling you would know that it is not that simple. I have to pull down the latest compiled version of your website from the server, change the relevant bit of styling code, compile the entire site, check that it all works, commit the changes to the repository, deploy the changed code to the server and make sure that the cache is cleared so that you can see that the changes have been done. All of that takes around half an hour to get done, and that is assuming that I’ve worked on your website before and have access to everything that I need to make the changes.

So, yes, I am actually being pretty selfish when I say that you should learn at least the theory behind how to make a website. If you understand what I have to do, even if you couldn’t actually do it yourself, then the fees that I charge and the excuses or reasons that I give for not being able to do something quickly will make more sense to you.

So, if you want to understand your website and your developer better, learn how to make a website. It doesn’t need to be a complex one. You can even use WordPress as a place to start. Go digging around in a WordPress site and see what you dig up and how complicated it can actually be to customise those layouts and colours if the theme is not set up to handle it. Your developer will thank you for it.