Making the Jump from Designer to Developer

I'm going to date myself here, but when I got my design degree, website developing was a new – and frankly – unnecessary skill for the time. Fast forward 10 years, I move to North Carolina and join an app development team. I needed to learn how to code, and fast. I had a long way to go – not even knowing the basics at the time, but there were tools that I found helpful along the way that I'll put out there for anyone who might be taking the same leap.

You might be thinking, "Why do I have to learn this stuff? I can create a website with Wix in three hrs!" And this is true, but if you're going to customize professional sites that are mobile responsive, you'll want to keep reading.

w3schools.com
This site is great for learning the basics of HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. It has live example windows where you can alter the code and see the results.

lynda.com
While expensive, if you're already a designer you probably have an account already and they have great coding video tutorials – not only for the basics. They also cover additional coding languages like Python, Ruby and Swift

stackoverflow.com
This is a code community forum so you'll sometimes see multiple solutions to coding challenges, but you get a lot of valuable information and the contributors are helpful. It's good to get the basics down first since the solutions are very technical and you'll need to know the right way to implement the solutions to be effective.

There are many CMS platforms that require little to no coding ability, but your options will be limited. Knowing the basics can open up many opportunities for you and your clients. And at the least it will make things less frustrating.