With all the user-friendly website builders available for the D.I.Y crowd, why bother with coding?
These days, there are a number of apps, platforms, templates, widgets, themes, and plugins that will help you build a website. But in the end, they’re all just tools. They often can’t build your website.
Every site is different: Different needs, different looks, different color schemes, etc. And while these aforementioned tools are excellent jumping-off points, you need to be able to tweak the inner code of them to really be able to customize them for your unique website.
That’s where I come in.
I’m well-versed in the coding languages that make up the vast majority of websites , as well as most of the major CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, and ASP.NET among others). Knowing how to use the coding languages allows me to build you a custom website from scratch or tinker with the code of an existing platform or template in order to customize it to your particular needs.
Having a web designer that knows how to code well will help you in at least two significant ways:
- Search engines put sites with shoddy coding lower on their results lists. Sites with good coding are more likely to be seen in search results.
- You are no longer limited to templates and “factory settings”. Website templates and add-ons do their best to be flexible, but even the best ones can’t always accommodate your needs. Knowing how to work with the code allows you to make the subtle adjustments that make all the difference.
Here are a few examples of sites that I have created entirely by hand:
Before
This is the demo page for the theme “Enterprise Pro”, assembled by professionals to showcase all its bells and whistles.
After
By customizing the code, I was able to use the basic layout, but create an aesthetic impact using a color scheme and layout that wasn’t possible with the options that the theme had on its own.
