A Day in the Life of a Web Developer
I have been a coder for the last 12 years of my life. Basically as soon as I heard about the internet and got a connection, I was online trying to figure out why everything operated the way that it did. This of course led me to pursue a better understanding of the programming languages involved in creating websites and learning how to develop my own personal sites. As I mastered one thing after another, I realized how important it was that I kept learning as much as I could about the internet.
After several years involved in the industry, I eventually decided to open up my own company, developing websites and doing marketing for some of the largest internet companies of the time, such as treeloot.com, mypoints.com, and many of the other massive sites of the day. My staff began to grow substantially as our clients would send referrals to us all of the time. We were gaining so many customers that we just couldn't handle all of the business and had to start turning customers away. This is when we knew we had something for us. Unfortunately, when the bubble burst on the internet, and many of these companies wen bankrupt, so did those companies that supported these sites. My small company was amongst them. We were directly tied to so many companies that were involved in the stock market burst that eventually we just had to close our doors, but in that time, I learned a great deal about the website business that you just can't learn in a class.
As a web developer on a daily basis, I had a load of freedom. I knew that the customer generally wouldn't have a clue what I was doing, so I could easily charge whatever I wanted, and do things whatever way I wanted to. The majority of clients only had a basic idea of what they wanted and just wanted you to create something for them. Most of the customers could tell me little more than their site idea and then I had to make it happen and find an efficient way for them to make money off of their sites.
Every three days I would have to give status reports and provide the customers with screen shots of the current progress on the site. I also had to spend a great deal of time on conference calls so that I could attempt to explain the technology, which at the time was still relatively new to many people. This would often times result in relatively complex presentations that I would have to present to the users remotetly through a web cam. This of course added an incredible amount of work to my day, and made for some really long hours.
For the most part, however, the main day was spent coming up with personalized templates, along with the help of a graphic designer. Since I would be the one coding the site, I would have to work alongside the graphics designer so that the template would fit with my coding. I also had to work with the copywriter to make sure that the copy would fit into certain areas and to determine how I wanted to set up different aspects of the site where writing was required.
But, overall the day was pretty interesting and would go by extremely fast. The thing I liked most about the job was that there was always something going on. We made great money, and I got to talk to a lot of really powerful business people that I'm still in contact with to this day. To me, that's what would make my day as a web developer.
